In January 2009, with me as director, Medea Collaborative Media Initiative was launched as a research center at Malmö University. Focusing on collaborative media, design for social innovation, and collaborative cultural production, during the years we have published three books with The MIT Press (Design Things in 2011, Collaborative Media in 2013, and Making Futures in 2014), published over 30 articles in peer reviewed journals or proceedings, and created a large international network. With its large studio in the Western harbour of Malmö, Medea has also been the site for many collaborations with external partners, and the site for many events.
I held the position as director for Medea for about two years, before stepping down in order to concentrate on teaching and doing research. Thus, for a couple of years I have not had that much to do with Medea. However, in September, when the faculties of Culture and Society, and Technology and Society, move into Malmö University’s brand new building Niagara, Medea will reboot and start anew under my directorship. We will now just be called Medea, and the tagline for the lab will be “a research lab for collaborative media, design, and public engagement”.
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We will not have the kind of large scale studio that we had in the former building but we will have a small showroom placed very nicely on the ground floor of Niagara. It will be highly visible and we will use it for temporary exhibitions and as a lab space. All in all, we regard the “new” Medea as an experimental lab, where we will try to make things happen that cannot happen within traditional departments. We are financed by the faculty of Culture and Society, and already more than 50 researchers from Media and Communication Studies, Interaction Design, Product Design, Urban Studies, Architecture, Sociology, Cultural Geography and other disciplines have expressed interest in taking part in the work. A new version of the Medea webpage has already been launched, and our first public event will be a talk by Ezio Manzini, author of Design, When Everybody Designs (MIT Press, 2015). You can read more about the restart here.