NEWS At the December meeting, the University Board reached the decision to establish two additional focus environments, one in the KBC Building and another at the Medical Library at the University Hospital of Umeå.
The investment in developing interactive environments at Umeå University were commenced at the beginning of 2012, when the University Board of Directors decided to set off SEK 72 million to establish five such settings – two interactive learning environments and three interactive focus environments.
The first focus environment was placed in the Social Sciences Building, which from 2013 has been refurbished in stages. The other learning environment, in the Humanities Building, underwent a more extensive refurbishment between 2013 and 2014.
In summer 2015, the work on the first focus environment in the open atrium area of the MIT Building – where the new café will be inaugurated on 18 January 2016. The environment is intended to become a place for students, teachers, researchers and collaborative partners to gather around common issues and needs. Now another two focus environments will come into place.
The KBC Building is the Chemical Biological Centre at Umeå University and was built in 1999 as an interdisciplinary research and learning environment. Several departments and units from the Faculty of Science and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine and the School of Forestry at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) have research collaborations and share services and infrastructure here. Many of these have national status and are being used in collaboration with other higher education institutions in Sweden. An addition to this is the new MBC (Medical Biology Centre) being built in the adjacent Biology Building on campus.
The new, interactive focus environment will mainly be positioned in the entrance and in the KBC café, which already acts as a meeting place for students and researchers alike. The positioning also provides access to the various multifunctionality of the technology platforms, and hence increase the contact between education and research, as well as between researchers and research groups working in various ways with somehow related projects or problems.
The importance of internal and external communication is of particular importance in this project for the spread of knowledge through interactive sources that can be searched and found based on research groups, research projects and infrastructure.
The need to facilitate for meetings between people from different educations and research areas is of particular importance at the Faculty of Medicine, but also in other areas such as computer science and behavioural science. This goes for students and teachers from different study programmes, but also between patients, colleagues working off-site, caregivers and caretakers.
The environment will be designed for use for presentations, exhibits, seminars and discussions on digital research posters.
Parallel to the discussions revolving the focus environment, the Faculty of Medicine and the county council (VLL) have planned a joint Clinical Training Centre (KTC) to provide students with a place for practicing sampling and CPR. The objective is to develop the focus environment and KTC with joint operations and physical vicinity to one another and to the nearby research centre for Biomedical Engineering and Physics. Creating a natural bridge between research, application and innovation can result in a forum for ideas to be shared and innovations to be elaborated on – not least the already existing 3D printing project at the library.
Read more about the interactive environments:
2015-10-28: Umeå University to build state-of-the-art research environment
2014-12-17: New interactive environment coming to MIT Building
2014-07-14: Education’s new challenges
2013-04-23: Space for future learning
2012-10-29: Humanities Building to get major facelift
2012-09-19: Umeå University invests in interactive environments
Anders Fällström, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Umeå UniversityPhone: +46 90-786 66 28
Email: anders.fallstrom@umu.se
Lisbeth Lundahl, professor at the Department of Applied Educational Sceince (TUV).Phone: +46 90-786 69 20
Email: lisbeth.lundahl@umu.se
Ellen Skånberg, architect at the Building Office and HumlabPhone: +46 70-345 35 62
Email: ellen.skanberg@umu.se
(New coordinators will be appointed in December 2015)
Editor: Anna Lawrence