The Paradigm Shift

We are in the middle of a significant paradigm shift where we enter a new era. The development can be identified by the three human arts:

the art of writing (2500 b.c.)
the art of printing (1400)
the art of communication (2000)

We strongly believe that the ongoing change process is monumental in the known history of man. This fact is reflected in our activities and the preceding work done by Per Christiansson.

Aims

To study how collaboration between man can be enforced by networked computer stored knowledge and how the computer supported collaboration can be supported by advanced information technology, IT, tools. It is also studied how underlying computer stored knowledge can be effectively captured, linked and represented in the Dynamic Knowledge Net to support efficient knowledge communication. KBS-Media Lab's motto is "The Future in Practice" which well reflects a clear ambition to combine theory and practice. The KBS-Media Lab aims can be listed as:

form a creative research environemnt
support knowledge transfer towards industry, research and education, and support collaboration between research groups
maintain and develop relations to international projects, strategy work and trends within the IT-area

as well as

analyse different knowledge representations and how these can be mixed and linked with adapted media for presentation and access in the Dynamic Knowledeg Net, DKN.
formulate new concepts for augmentation of co-operating knowledge
generate and test new concepts for computer supported communication and collaboration
to formulate and test new concepts to combine IT and building process models, especially to support the maintenance of buildings, and to formulate and test new concepts to build and search computer stored building process models

Demonstrators are developed together with industry to generate, capture, communicate and evaluate new ideas. The demonstrators will in the end of a project be the developed prototype.

Background

The KBS-Media Lab was created 1987 based on the preceding work of Per Christiansson within the IT domain (1970-). The Lab was situated in own localities from 1990 at the Civil Engineering School of Lund Insitute of Technology. Since March 1995 the KBS-Media Lab has new bigger localities in the new central IT center at Lund University (CITU, The Center for IT in education).

The research is supported from external sources as, The Swedish Council for Building Research (BFR), The Development Fund of the Swedish Construction Industry (SBUF), Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development (NUTEK), Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN), Swedish Telecom (TELIA), Apple Computer Inc, Lund University, and The Culture Museum.

Per Christiansson