KMDI - Knowledge Media Design Institute

Knowledge media are building blocks of a knowledge society

• History

About Us

What we do

Founded in 1996, KMDI is UofT's 1st Virtual Institute

KMDI's mission is research and graduate education in all aspects of building the knowledge society. With over 150 University of Toronto faculty members, associates, and graduate students from the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and the arts, our research in knowledge media design is helping to shape the products, processes and practices of the 21st century.

KMDI's network spreads across the globe and is rooted at the University of Toronto in Canada's largest and most diverse city, in the heart of an intellectually, culturally, and technologically creative and innovative community.

KMDI's goal is stimulate collaborative projects of national and international significance through the development of innovative research partnerships with other universities, the private sector, non-profit organizations and government.

A few highlights:

• Spring 1996: International, interdisciplinary conference on the Internet
• Home of ePresence Interactive Media; an innovative webcasting technology designed and created in our labs srtarting in 1999
• KMDI named Toronto Changemaker in Information by Toronto's Massive Change exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario
• Winter 2004: Project Open Source | Open Access, a site of network building, critical enquiry, and student engagement around the emerging phenomenon of openness
• Spring 2006: Nominated for the City of Toronto Leonardo da Vinci Awards celebrating creativity and innovation

KMDI is a leader in adopting a human-centred approach to design, an approach that means people are at the heart of what we do. Furthermore, we are developing a distinctively Canadian approach to design - one that respects the individual and attends to the public good. KMDI challenges both the technological utopians and dystopians with a vision that is constructively critical We take into account our heritage and history, engaging with the realities of today as we design for tomorrow.

In carrying out this mission we:

• nurture an intellectual community of scholars, researchers, and students working in the area of knowledge media design.
• integrate the discipline of design prominently within these activities.
• create new courses, and stimulate more effective use of existing courses across disciplinary boundaries.
• sponsor and organize colloquia and lecture series on topics in these areas
• support graduate students in this area.
• facilitate visits to the University of Toronto, both short-term and long-term, of distinguished scholars and researchers working in knowledge media design.
  

How we do it

KMDI is a 21st century organisation and the University of Toronto's first virtual insitute. As a distributed network we are an experiment in living in a distributed environment. This maps well with our early and ongoing research focus on collaboration practices and collaboration technologies, and our long term association with the field of CSCW: computer-supported cooperative work.

Our organisation form resembles a fish-net. Visualise a fishnet, the knots repesenting individuals and the strands connecting them are their common interests. Peaks form as individual faculty and students come together in cross-disciplinary project teams. The form is agile, yet strong, readily accommodating the dynanics of project life cycles. Strength and the flexibility come from the interconnections, the net has identifiable boundaries and structural integrity yet can be readily extended.

At the outset KMDI was a completely distributed organisation. Today, the institute has a small cluster of offices, a well equipped combination meeting room, classroom and lab in the Bahen Centre for Information Technology. However, the majority of Institute members remain distributed. And while we now have more technical capacity to make it easier to work with colleagues across campus, across the country and globally, the challenges to build, support and sustain a social network remain, and continue to be a subject of our research. The key to the success of this largely virtual institue is the community and network of relationships that has been developed over the past 13 years among its diverse faculty members, students and outside partners, both local and global.

Today, we are working further to express this network in the context of the City of Toronto, working with partners in the other Toronto universities to create what we are calling The Toronto School. This loosely-coupled network recognises existing partnerships of KMDI faculty with other scholars in the city and fosters cross-institutional collaboration in ways that contribute to Toronto's reputation as a world-class centre for research and innovation at the nexus of media, art, technology and design.

More about us

Stepping UP: KMDI's Academic Plan, 2004-2010
KMDI 5-year Report, 2003/2004 - 2007/2008  Appendices

Read more about the intellectual history of Knowledge Media Design at the University of Toronto