KMDI

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Welcome. We are a human-centred collaborative design institute at the University of Toronto.

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KMDI has been involved in graduate teaching since 2002. Check out our Educational Programs and Offerings!

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kmdi_logo_vertThe Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) is an interdisciplinary unit of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Founded in 1996 by Professor Ron Baecker, the institute is U of T’s first virtual institute to deal with interdiscplinary issues of collaborative design in the artifacts of knowledge creation, production and distribution.  Representing over 25 units across three campuses of the university, KMDI was launched in 1997.

In 2002, the Institute came involved in teaching with the introduction of a Collaborative Programin Knowledge Media Design.The Collaborative Program in Knowledge Media Design offers an interdisciplinary specialization to a regular departmental degree program.

Today, our researchers and students explore, design, and critique the knowledge media that enable people to communicate, create, learn, share, and collaborate.  The institute has a cluster of offices in the Robarts Library as well as a meeting room, and classroom.  The current director,Professor Mark Chignell, along with a distinguished executive committee work with faculty, students, and alumni from over twenty-five departments and eleven faculties. The KMDI community also extends to research and business in the public and private sectors to develop new projects.

kmdi2-e1361998059760The Knowledge Media Design Collaborative Program (KMD CP) spans the study of ways in which media and media technologies shape and are shaped by human activity.  We design, build, use, evaluate, and critique the media and polices of our networked world.  The KMD CP is designed to provide graduate students opportunities to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds on interdisciplinary human-centred projects that explore the interaction between media, technology, design and society. KMD courses allow students to work with experts from across disciplinary boundaries to tackle complex socio-technical issues around the design, dissemination, preservation and interaction with knowledge systems.  Students, through experiential learning, engage in each stage of the design thinking process – brainstorming, prototyping, and evaluation.  Projects are geared towards real-world problems and are designed to give students opportunities to publish papers, deliver conference presentations, and even provide the groundwork for start-up businesses.

KMDI itself is a recognized leader in the international KMD community, its graduate students connecting with a network of researchers, scholars and practitioners in both the university and private sectors.  As members of KMDI’s research community, Collaborative Program Students gain access to cross-departmental resources and are provided training and support for a range of new technologies implemented directly in their course projects and as platforms for larger research programs.  Study in the Collaborative Program better prepares U of T graduates for critical engagement with new media in the context of real world practices of individuals and communities, who innovate, collaborate and create media and technologies designed to support and enhance the ability of people, groups and communities to work, learn, play and create knowledge.

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Copyright © 2013 KMDI, a multidisciplinary unit of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto