New interactive environment coming to MIT Building

“We want to make the MIT Building livelier and create a place in which students and researchers can meet and work together,” says Mikael Wiberg, head of the Department of Informatics at Umeå University and member of the reference group. “The environment will become a way to visualise and enable greater integration between the MIT Building activities along with education and research. It will be meeting place for projects and joint activities among the university and surrounding community. We have an extremely positive outlook to this initiative.”

The MIT Building will be Umeå University’s first focus environment, a place where students, teachers, researchers and partners can gather around common issues and needs.  The focus is on visualisation and interpretation, and it is about understanding and representing different problems and increasing amounts of data. The environment is to be based on laboratory and process-oriented approach in mathematics and IT. These are disciplines that unite the majority of academic disciplines and many research profiles in the MIT Building.

“There is a strong interest in pedagogical development and collaboration in the MIT Building,” says Anders Fällström, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and chair of the steering committee for interactive environments.

The new premises will be built in the atrium area near the main entrance of the building, which currently is a café. A reception area will welcome visitors and the environment will include digital screens for visualisation and presentations.

”The environment intends to be a natural gathering place and, upon entering, visitors will experience a clearer and more business-oriented view of the building's activities, its research and all the exciting projects that our students are involved in,” says Mikael Wiberg.

There will be flexible and movable furniture in the new premises. During larger events it will be possible to build a stage. A flexible seminar room will be constructed in the current area occupied by house services, which will be bookable by all departments. The Umeå Union of Science and Technology (NTK) café will be relocated to the adjacent atrium, after a mutual agreement amongst the union and project group. The relocation is funded within the framework of the project.

”Our aim is to have more study places in the MIT Building after the rebuilding and that the café will have similar conditions as its current status,” says Anders Fällström.

The building start is planned for the summer of 2015. The costs are SEK 19.4 million for the period 2013-2020.

About interactive environments at Umeå University

In December 2012, the university board of directors approved funding for the development of interactive environments at Umeå University. A total of SEK 72 million was designated towards investment in two separate types of environments – learning environments and focus environments.  

Learning environments are open to all and are not restricted to specific academic areas or research environments. The new Humanities Building that was re-opened in October 2013 and the renovated premises in the Social Sciences Building are examples of learning environments. The MIT Building will be the first with a focus environment. These environments are smaller in area than learning environments and are places in which students, teachers, researchers and partners can gather around common issues and needs. Focus environments will also be installed in the KBC Building and in one of the Faculty of Medicine locales to be named ar a later date.