The underlying goal of the organization is to ensure that technology serves as the purpose of lifelong learning. That is, rather than software engineers determining the look and feel of software, and its application, research is going into how end users would like to have their software. This is resulting in an otherwise unlikely alliance between sociologists, philosophers, and software engineers into how ideal user interfaces and software packages ought to be written, adapting to the needs, learning style, and creativity of the end user rather than imposing one on them. KMDI offers many courses through over 20 schools and faculties on campus. Assistant Director of KMDI, Gail Moore, points out that all technologies involve humans which at every step make decisions toward its development and use.
Technologies can be good or bad, due to either good or bad decisions on the part of the designers.
Computers can either enhance the freedom and dignity of ordinary citizens, or they can merely reinforce a social hierarchy which can make us slaves to our machines, and thus be bad for society. So, it's not what we design that's the problem, but how we design it. For example, many software users, including programmers, rely on teamwork to do their job. There would be little use for a software or network that uses a design philosophy that fragments workers in a company and reinforces competitive behaviour among the workers if they are supposed to work as a team. Graduate students and academics are presently learning what they can about the delivery and transmission of information over gigapops and network-based caches.