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Dark Horse Espresso Bar on Spadina, in the heart of Toronto’s high tech hub, is, for me, the ultimate example of space as a networking tool. Sit here here for any amount of time, and you will hear conversations that sound like they’re probably interviews, descriptions of apps in progress, friends of friends recognizing each other across the table and showing off portfolios, and all kinds of casual discussions about trends, sales strategies, developments, and news. The person next to me is on skype. I’m sitting here as I write this, in fact, and I almost feel like I’ve dropped in on some hip new office. This is a space where work gets done. People don’t come here just to hang out; they come here to make the world a better place.

Possibly in part because the high tech sector is so flexible and full of tiny start ups that may not have offices of their own, or freelancers who want to feel part of the larger world from time to time. Or because so many businesses can benefit from connecting with each other, so a place like this acts as a living room for a busy, sprawling blended family. For all of these reasons, I think it’s an interesting space to look at with the eyes of a librarian. Because we don’t tend to build spaces like this.

Dark Horse was my first experience of a communal table. (And the first time I sat down here, I discovered myself sitting across from someone I’d spoken to on twitter but never met in real life, in keeping with the theme.)

Right up at the front of the place, up by the front doors, are two large communal tables. They are so big that you can’t take over one of them yourself. So no one does. The culture of the place doesn’t allow that. You sit down next to people you don’t know, because that’s how it works.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at communal tables and puzzling over them. I suppose that’s another post in itself, really; communal tables are very appealing, but very, very tricky. There is a direct and critical relationship between the social culture of a space and the physical dimensions of the furniture that can make a communal table succeed or fail, and the mathematics of predicting that are well beyond me. Where a culture allows a thinner table to be used communally, making it okay for strangers to sit close to each other in public, then a thin table can be shared by strangers and succeed. But strangers tend to be shy to varying degrees, and if that culture of space sharing and reduced personal space isn’t already there and understood, a communal table has to be much wider. I suspect you can graph the anxiety and shyness of your target population, the degree to which they understand the social culture of the space into which they’re stepping,  the amount of space around each chair, and the width of a communal table and get a formula out of this. I’m pretty sure there’s a science to this.

This communal table at Dark Horse is very wide. It’s a square, in fact. You’d think, if you’re a space planner trying to get as many bums in seats as possible, that it’s a bit of a waste of space. No one’s  using the middle of this table. But that space is what enforces the social culture of Dark Horse. You can’t carry on a conversation with the people on the other side of it. It’s too wide. This is, for me, the ultimate shared table. This is furniture that doesn’t negotiate. It’s not your table. It’s where we all sit, and we all do what we need to do. Sometimes that’s a conversation with the person next to us. Sometimes it’s a group of people sitting with computers open. Sometimes someone’s going to take out a phone and start a conversation. All these things are okay around the communal table, because while the purposes for being here are all different, the people around this table are opting in to sharing space this way. And feeling connected to strangers.

If you’re interested in communal tables, Dark Horse will be my first recommendation for a visit. It’s not the only one, but it’s the most relentlessly sharable one.

The image in my head of Dark Horse is so dominated by these communal tables that I actually failed to notice in my first two visits here that there is more space than this. A few steps up on the other side of the espresso bar, there’s an area for different kinds of interaction. Some small tables that can seat two, but are currently taken over but individuals within open laptops, a space for four or five, and a few spaces for groups of three, with lower tables. These are spaces that insist that you not sit there with a laptop. These are conversational areas. And they are in use as conversation areas: I think I walked through a business meeting when I went in to snap these pics. Sorry about the quality. I’m trying not to interrupt anyone.

I’m always interested in spaces that are not quiet but get used as space for individual work. You could work at home. you could hole up in a library (that’s certainly cheaper). People are going to chat and laugh around you. On the way here today there were only three people on my car on the train, and one of them was on his phone making business calls for the entire trip. It drove me (trying to write over here) and the car’s only other passenger (trying to read my novel, thanks) absolutely nuts. But when you step into a place like this, you don’t expect silence. So it doesn’t bother you. Isn’t that strange? It’s less about sensitivity to noise and more about expectation. There’s something that appeals to people about working in a noisy, active, busy place like this. You’re in the heart of a hip neighbourhood, someone you want to connect with might drop in at any time, you’re around a lot of creative and passionate people. You make a statement when you work in an place like this. It’s a statement about availability, about what you think is important, and about who you think you are. Those conversations going on around you might change your life.

I’ve started to understand that most things we do are about self-identity, and the spaces we chose to frequent are very much a part of that process. Libraries are part of that equation as well, though we rarely frame them that way. It would be interesting to look at library spaces with an eye to what we’re helping patrons say about themselves to themselves and others. I think, in the end, it’s thinking that way that makes a space a social force.

Very often, when we consider where in our libraries patrons will need to use digital materials, we add a station like this one. This is a terminal at the University of London Senate House Library. It’s placed helpfully in the stacks, near study areas. Like most such terminals, the point is probably to give students access to the catalogue while they’re browsing for physical materials and not very much more. It’s not a spot where you can sit down and spread out. There were other, better places to work on a paper or study. It’s exactly the kind of set up you see in most libraries of any description.

I understand why we do this. We’re coming from a good place. We want our patrons to feel comfortable. We want them to never be limited by the lack of a keyboard. Even if the catalogue can be browsed quite easily on a touch screen, what if you need to do something that requires sustained typing? I understand the impulse to account for every possible need within a rational budget. It’s logical, and thoughtful, and it’s technically open to changing needs and contexts. You can see how we think digital material is going to be used: alone. Not with a group of students, not with help from a librarian or a TA. Interacting with digital media, in this context, is very much an independent exercise.

This is the interactive mall directory at Square One, Mississauga. (And that handsome devil is my nephew, Max.) No keyboards, no mouse. Just a clearly designated directory. You can’t plonk down here and check your email, it’s true. You can’t write an essay on it. But you can work out where you’re going, and find out what this particular mall has in store for you. You can also walk up to it with your friend (or, as Max did, with your crazy aunt who takes photos and videos of odd things).

This is Max doing some fake navigation for me so I could film it. The downside of these things is that, at this point, you need to pay someone to create the digital materials for you to display like this. After years of static, keyboard-and-mouse based input, the easiest systems don’t respond as well to touch-based devices and interfaces. But that’s changing, and will continue to change with the rise of tablets and other larger-format touch-based interfaces. There is increasingly few technical reasons why libraries can’t provide catalogue and information access points that look less like the workstation above and more like what Square One is doing.

I ran into some interesting interactive screens in the Disney Store in Toronto. The focus is primarily on a projected film on the wall, but there’s associated information showing on two screens that flank it. Since this area is for children, the screens are smaller, slower, and primarily graphics-based. I think this is really interesting, mostly because Disney surely knows that the children in this store are bound to be incredibly distracted. There’s input coming at them everywhere. The store is full of toys. There’s a cartoon playing against the wall. But they integrated screens at the right level for their audience, and integrated it so that it’s not distracting from the purpose of being there, but adding to it. These children don’t need to turn away from what they’re doing to see the digital material. It’s part of the experience. And it’s a part of the experience that doesn’t dictate how many people can gather around it at once.

This is a screen that controls the printers at Staples just off Dundas Square in Toronto. Again, no keyboard, no mouse. Like some of the stellar digital terminals at M&S in London, this machine takes a card for payment. It’s low profile, small footprint screen that doesn’t require a desk at all. This Staples doesn’t really have room for a desk. Sometimes necessity breeds some good ideas. I mean, it’s not pretty, but it’s computing in a tight space, without setting up a whole  independent workstation. It’s set up for people who are there to do a single thing and want to get it done quickly; that’s a goal a lot of library patrons can identify with.

This is a terminal at the Google co-working space in London. Because it’s a fairly noisy spot, there are a variety of noise-cancelling and relaxation-type areas. This pod digitally delivers information while the user is in this audio-limited environment.  Digital material, as you can see, is the least complicated part of it.

Looking around and seeing the variety of ways that digital material can delivered at point of need that doesn’t involve a chair, a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor is an important reminder to me. We shouldn’t assume that digital material can only be consumed in one physical way.

Bear with me for a moment here. This is mostly a thought experiment.

As I travel around looking at different kinds of spaces, I’ve started to question our relentless quest for total silence in libraries. Libraries have come to mean silence in our culture; why is that? Because silence is associated with reading? (Of course, only with modern reading: we know that medieval European readers considered reading a verbal activity, always done aloud, and if you’ve ever found yourself mouthing the words you’re reading on a page, you know we’re fighting our bodies to make reading silent. No need to be elitist about it: text is only a series of symbols representing speech. There’s no shame in it triggering our verbal centres. That’s perfectly natural.) When libraries are closed-stack, and the spaces inside it exist only as a reading room for material you can’t copy and can’t take out with you,  I can understand the focus on silence. To a degree, anyway. Silence is meant to go along with concentration. And libraries are meant to be places where you go to concentrate, right?

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Everywhere I go, I find students and the self-employed deliberately seeking out spaces that are not silent. Some of them are downright raucous. A lot of them have jazz playing in the background, coffee grinders, conversations, laughter. Some of them are quieter than others, but none of them are silent. I’ve seen several co-working spaces, and a few high-tech businesses here and there. No private offices, only shared tables, conference rooms, kitchens and “libraries”.  Nooks for groups, couches, lots of earphones in the ears of those trying to buckle down and work alone. No spaces with a fixation on providing absolute silence, though.

I’ve been considering whether my comparisons with cafés and co-working spaces are entirely fair. I realize I’m looking at a particular sample of the population, the people who want to work this way. These are people who have a quiet space at home and find it difficult to work like that. These are people who want to be tangentially connected to other people while doing independent work, even if they’re strangers. I think there’s probably even a little bit of self-motivation going on; when I finish this paper, I can go home and relax. Being somewhere other than at home helps you stick to a deadline and helps manage your time. That’s really healthy, I think. Co-workers in particular often need that separation between home and work to help give the work day a sense of closure, something students and academics both frequently fail to do well. The people I see working this way have quiet space elsewhere if they really need it.

But then I thought: don’t our student populations have this as well? Not all of them, maybe. But what percentage of the student populations don’t have a room of their own with a door that closes? I imagine it’s pretty small. So far my experience of residences on campus always includes some form of study room (and often study groups, as well.) For campuses where students can easily go back and forth from home where they can have silence and solitude, it seems to me that there’s more in common between libraries and other public and commercial spaces like cafés than we may have thought.

My own campus has it’s own rhythms and issues. Students can’t easily come and go from home, and many of them commute in quite a distance. They are effectively stuck on campus, and they may need that silence because they legitimately can’t get it anywhere else between the hours of 8am and 9pm. Again, I’m not entirely sure why the library is the place required to provide perfect silence, but I suppose that’s the tradition as we have it. We’re kind of stuck with it.

A lot of the students on my campus commute from their parents’ homes, so they share space with other family members. This is generally presented as a reason why no work can get done at home, but I’m not entirely convinced that that’s entirely true. Most homes with adult children in them are pretty quiet. Parents are usually supportive of students working hard on their school work. (Not always, I know. There are always stories and circumstances.) I would suspect that, most of the time, residence is far louder than anyone’s household, and even residences have silent spaces in them.

Why are we promising to provide absolute silence,  something so difficult to maintain it is practically impossible, if the vast majority of our patrons already have access to it when they need it?

Too harsh? Bear with me a moment longer.

Here’s a statistic I don’t know: what percentage of our student populations would sit in a comfy chair in a Starbucks and write an essay if they knew no one was going to harass them to buy anything or glare at them to give up their table. As far as I can see, we expect that about 70-80% of our students want to work in complete silence. If that’s true, 70-80% of students should abhor working in a public place like a Starbucks. I find that exceedingly unlikely, but I don’t know what those stats actually look like.

Maybe the music is too loud: okay. how about a little indie café in the distillery district, or buried in the annex behind a bookstore? Somewhere with ambient music, soft conversations, coffee. Not too busy, not too quiet. Alive. I don’t know the statistic; I don’t know how many students would be happy to work there. Walking around London, seeing the 3/4ths empty and quiet Senate House library, and the jammed and happily buzzing public libraries, the full cafés of Islington, Hampstead and Shoreditch, the students lining the tables at the Barbican and Southbank Centre, I struggle to imagine that it’s a small percentage. But I don’t know. This is critical information to me at this point. I’m going to have to find a way to get it.

I haven’t said it yet, but I’m sure you can feel it coming. What if most students don’t actually require absolute silence to do really good work?

I can already hear the objections. I’ve seen them; students in my library complain about the noise all the time. I can’t keep saying “bear with me” whenever I say something outrageous, can I? But what if this is in part based on expectations that we’ve set, both through our policies, our space design, and through our powerful public image? What if they demand silence between they just imagine they can expect it, and should expect it, because we’ve promised it, not because they actually require it? We are allowing students to have unrealistic expectations of our entire buildings, top to bottom. Libraries are meant to be silent, so every sound they hear is annoying.

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What if we designed spaces based on the presumption that most students don’t need absolute silence, but want a comfortable level of ambient sound that isn’t too annoying, much like a half-empty café? What if we designed lots of different kinds of spaces, the kinds of spaces cafés and other public spaces increasingly have, with coffee/tea available, but no pressure to get out of your seat and give your table to someone else? What if we created that for 70-80% of our spaces?

There’s still the question of silence.

I seem anti-silence at the moment, but I’m not, really. I’m only asking questions. I’m only suggesting that the desire for absolute silence might not be felt by the majority, as long as if there is other, really functional, comfortable, not overwhelmingly-noisy spaces on offer that clearly doesn’t promise something it can’t deliver. There will certainly be people who want absolute silence.

What if silence becomes a specialized service? Perhaps the way to break the association of a library with perfect silence in all places is to create a space that is specifically designed and pitched as entirely silent? Enclosed, with a clear demarcation between the normal zone and the dead quiet zone. If you’re in here, you’re here to be totally, completely, utterly quiet. No phones. Maybe no wifi. Maybe no 3G at all (if that’s even legal.) No ipods, no music, because sometimes you can hear them and that’s annoying. Nothing: just silence. Quiet keyboards only? How extreme can you reasonably get?

I don’t know the statistics, so I don’t know for a fact what size a space like that would need to be to accommodate the people who would want it, but from what I see so far, I imagine it probably doesn’t need to be monstrous. Maybe it’s nestled in among the stacks, using the books to muffle even the sounds of keyboards and pencils scratching. But it’s strict, exclusive, and maybe you even need to apply to be allowed in. It would have a zero tolerance policy. It would, I imagine, build it’s own culture and empower students to tell each other to shut up should they need to. The eye conversations would be epic.

We are currently encumbered by the idea that the silence rule currently applies to anything called a library. Most libraries tell you to shhh with their staff and their signage. We tell you what your behaviour has to be from one area to the next. But what if, instead of telling people how to behave, we offer the spaces where the behaviour restrictions are a service?

In some ways it’s just a matter of rebranding, isn’t it.  but I know for a fact that just rebranding the quiet areas in my library as a service rather than a set of rules wouldn’t create this kind of atmosphere. There’s a bit more to it, I think. Some of it is building in the right context, making the space look markedly different, having students pass over a threshold between one commitment and another. They need to actively choose to be there. You can’t stumble in accidentally. You go there with a purpose, armed with the knowledge of what it’s going to be like. You go in there to get work done, and then you get out.

Meanwhile, you give students other really good options for non-silence. We already know there are a lot of students who cannot work in complete silence and are pretty forthright about that. They want music playing. They want to be around people. Surely this is why we remain as busy as we are, even as the use of the collection and reference services declines. On my campus, the computer labs are empty but the library is packed. Most people, it seems, want to be around other people, even if they’re doing their own work. If we build great spaces for working near others, different levels of noise, different kinds of seating, all that other good stuff, and then have the vault for the times when you want absolute silence, offered as a service from us to them…

I think that might be interesting. I think it might work.

Just a thought experiment.

This is Timberyard, a very successfully-designed café that’s a big hit with students and other independent workers in Shoreditch. What strikes me about the places that have hit the right note with students is that incredibly wide variety of different kinds of seating, different kinds of spaces, and a thoughtful variety of configurations that acknowledges that not only do different people have different preferences, but one person generally has a variety of different needs from a space depending on their current task, mood, or circumstances.

The front of the house at Timberyard contains a modular shared couch, old suitcases that act as coffee tables, and plenty of outlets. Enough outlets for everyone.

A sight I’ve become accustomed to: bar seating by the window. This kind of space is almost universally understood as individual, private space within a public space. I’ve started to notice that in libraries that don’t build spaces like this, patrons will drag a chair over to a window, face it against the window, and create it. I think this kind of seating might be the most accessible and least threatening to people entering a social space like this alone. Facing outward is a kind of message that indicates that a patron is not only not looking for a conversation, but is here on their own for a reason. Again: notice the easy access to power.

A second band of bar seating, facing the wall. It’s more space that’s comfortable and available for individuals coming in alone and intimidated by the big, shared couch. But there’s another interesting thing about this bar seating:

The café provides not only wifi, but ipads for the purpose or browsing the internet while drinking your coffee or having your lunch. I’ve never seen anything like this outside of a library. When I wander through our library and see how students are using our computers, a good percentage of the time I see keyboards shoved up under the monitor and a laptop or book sitting in its place. A fixed ipad like this probably isn’t a bad replacement for a catalogue terminal, when you think of it. It makes that table far more multifunctional. It’s very generous of them to provide them, really. I found three of them around the café, admittedly none of them in use.

We’ve got individual space, very much shared, common space with the couch, and also more traditional shared space for groups: three tables for four. These are small enough that they aren’t shared by strangers; these are for people who know each other, are working together, or have decided to come here together to share the space as a group.

From above, a hint of what lies below:

Downstairs, more kinds of space, all of which seems to be designed with students in mind:

Quirky, mismatched, soft seating, in a variety of different configurations! Here they’ve got armchairs you can use as an individual, or with a group. Full-sized tables that, as you can see at the back, encourages group work. This furniture can move, but it doesn’t appear to, especially. If you don’t like one configuration, this café has many more to choose from. That’s another form of flexibility, one that doesn’t require reconfigurable tables or casters.

These group spaces, filled with the noise of people talking, also includes spaces that patrons use for individual work. As we know, there are many people who don’t like to work in complete silence or solitude. Being alone in a group is more productive for them, and you can see the evidence of that in places like this.

As in most places I’ve seen, there’s also a communal table. Interestingly, in spite of all the other available spaces at Timberyard, these folks prefer to work independently together here, with ready access to power. Communal tables are tricky, and interesting: there are signals that tell patrons they can share the table, but I don’t think they’re as simple as the size of the table or the number of chairs. That factors in, certainly, but I think the affordances of the rest of the space contributes as well. If everything else is sharable in a space, a communal table will be more shareable, even if it’s thin or smaller. I wish there were a ready and easy science to this, but I’m not sure there is. I’m really fascinated by the communal table; it’s potential is so tantalizing. For me it is the definition of flexible. It can support group work, become an instant conference room, and be a place for individual work as well, all without shifting the layout at all. It can support high tech work and digital collaboration as well as work with paper and post-it notes. It’s simple, familiar, and comforting. But I think it’s also the layout most sensitive to the context of the room and the hardest to get right. I’ve seen communal tables on my travels that I suspect don’t work that well. This isn’t one of them.

Cafés in the UK are especially interesting because they don’t have much of a culture of throwing people out if they stick around too long. In that sense, they are closer to libraries than almost anything else. We also create spaces and encourage students to stick around. Because of that, I feel like we have an incredible opportunity to create really terrific spaces without worrying about turnover. I knew I wanted to look at cafés as part of this project, but I really didn’t expect the parallels to be so strong.

Finding out where students like to study, and visiting those places, is really fascinating. That’s been my project for the last few days.

This is a place called Ozone Coffee Roasters. It’s a combination coffee roasting place and café. This is a view of the lower level: as you can see, it’s pretty much all communal tables. There’s the long thin one on the left, and the wider tables against the walls. 

Here’s some of the window seating upstairs. As you can see, pretty much every flat surface in this place is unstructured and communal. How this space gets used depends entirely on the people who sit down at it. It might be two people sitting together, or an individual sitting down with a computer. Unlike most bar seating up against windows, this table is really wide. It’s about as wide as the communal tables downstairs. Once I took one look at this space, I could understand why it was rated so highly as a study space. Students like to be able to spread out.

The bar. As you can see, this place has a culture of sitting down and digging into work. No one’s the slightest bit bothered that they’re looking into a busy working area rather than against a window.

I have to say, this place is loud. I imagine the students who come to work here really like that, because you’d have to. It’s a very trendy kind of industrial vibe, with lots of word. Very hip, loud, busy, and designed with serious coffee drinkers in mind.

Around the corner from Ozone is Salvation Jane, which is a way quieter, more chill kind of place. Much less polished, much less deliberately hip, but still funky and cool.

Here I think I saw some actual studying in action. Tables beyond, and the communal table in the foreground. This is a very slim communal table, and based on that I’m surprised it works. But it does.

More bar seating. This ledge table is quite slim, and sitting there definitely seems like a more solitary experience.

Salvation Jane has an extended outdoor area as well. It’s covered, so students could sit out there if it were warm enough, in spite of any potential rain.

What I can’t help but notice in spaces like this is the old-timey kitchen table feel they have. It’s almost ubiquitous, the big farmhouse tables and classic chairs. It’s furniture picked for vibe rather than comfort, which is interesting. (Though: to be fair, they’re not uncomfortable.)

Walking between one place an another, I spotted another, modern take on this layout:

This is sort of fast food chipotle place. Nothing fancy, but walking past, I couldn’t help but notice the same themes, just less quirky-traditional style and materials.  Here, like in Ozone, is a long, thin communal table.

Bar seating by the window, as is practically standard in nearly all libraries and cafés alike. And belowo that, something interesting: it’s a curved table. I didn’t get a good shot, but you can see the woman with the dark here and the light coat, with her back to us, in both pictures. The tables has a long straight end and a curved bit that goes into the restaurant. 

Another interesting play on a communal table theme.

This is a popular communal table in Penarth, Wales (just outside of Cardiff). I thought the single bench along with the more moble chairs was an interesting touch.

What’s interesting in all this is that I bet they got the communal table meme from us:

This is a shared study table in a library on display in a museum. Antique shared tables: not that much has changed, really:

This is one of many reading rooms at the Senate House library, University of London. We were on this communal table thing from the beginning, weren’t we? And check out this periodical reading room:

Is it just me, or is this room going for “high brow living room”?

I’ve got more popular study joints to check out. The trends are already poking through, though: quirky, cosy, flexible (not necessarily on casters) space, free wifi, no pressure to finish your drink and get out, and, there’s no getting around this, food. Food is the unifying theme of all the places I’ve visited that students like. Though many of them buy one coffee and sit for hours. the proximity to food, the ability to get food and coffee easily should it become required, is a key factor here. Many libraries have a very firm distinction between a café and the library proper. I’m starting to seriously question the wisdom of that. And I’m not the only one:

The café at the Canada Water library is in pride of place: right as you walk in, at the base of the stairs, in the atrium with its ceiling all the way at the very top of the building. Either because of this design, or, as the librarian at the desk told me, a problem with the ventilation system, the entire library smells like coffee and baked goods. Which may or may not be a good thing, really. But still: the café is an integral part of the library experience here.

“Eat in or take away,” inside the library. How about that?

I’ve written about the Whitechapel Idea Store café before, because it’s spectacular. They put it at the top of the building, alongside a news-watching area and current popular periodicals.

Food and thinking go together, which might be why cafés are such popular and comfortable places for students to dig in and study. We’re taken a lot of ideas from them, and they’ve taken a lot of ideas from us.

The spaces people have the choice to inhabit are, I’m discovering, often the most interesting when it comes to innovative design. But there’s so much to choose from! It’s relatively easy to find popular libraries and see how they’re laid out. What I’ve been investigating lately are the places where people choose to work. Fortunately, because locations are rated, tagged, and reviewed on Google Maps (via Google Plus), I’m able to see which locations are considered the best places for studying and working.

Which brought me to two places: the first is Tinderbox.

Tinderbox is a coffee shop in Angel, Islington. Based on the reviews and the photos online, I really thought this place would be bigger than it is. But I think that’s part of its charm. From this view, mostly what you see is the typical split between the common table and smaller tables for two. But there are a few more really unique and interesting spaces in this place.

These two spaces tucked away along the side of the main room are, I think, what make Tinderbox a winner with students. Below, there are three roomy booths with a very low head height. It’s a seated head height, and not much more, though no one’s hunching in there and no one seemed uncomfortable. On the contrary, all these booths are taken (I thought I could sneak into that last booth, but no, it’s taken too.)

There’s something about a cozy space. I met a student here who told me they call Tinderbox the Nook Café, because of all the interesting little spaces in it. Given that it’s a warehouse conversion, that’s quite a feat. All the nooks in it are entirely retrofitted from an open space.

I’ve seen several takes on the low-head-height approach, mostly with furniture. Psychology isn’t my area, but the idea that we tend to find smaller spaces comforting and comfortable resonates with me. A friend of mine (Lucas Barber, Project Manager at UTM Library and all-round good guy) once told me that his father, who builds houses for a living, always builds small bedrooms with attached sitting/dressing rooms rather than gigantic master suites. He says we don’t tend to sleep well in big, open rooms. That idea has always stuck with me; small, cozy rooms feel safe and comforable, even when we think bigger is better. I’ve noted this as a bit of a trend in the most popular studying spaces, too. Ensconced up in the rafters, facing outwards, looking down, with a lower head height; spaces like that seems private, safe, comfortable, and quiet. Does it help students to concentrate? To feel comfortable? At home?

The people inside these booths definitely seemed to be in rooms of their own without being entirely cut off from the larger group. Maybe that’s part of the appeal; alone in a crowd, off to one side, sheltered. Alone together.

The second (of several) interesting spaces at Tinderbox is the mezzanine level above the booths.

The low buzz of the café crowd below, a view and streetscape, low ambient lighting but good direct light on the table in front of you, power for your computer, and coffee. This space genuinely couldn’t be better designed for the student crowd. Tinderbox also has free wifi, so it doesn’t take much to see why this place is so well-loved and well lived-in.

The view from the mezzanine, and the third interesting space: a set of old, worn, ratty airplane seats. I found this area really interesting, because it breaks the rules for creating seating for two. Generally you arrange to have people face each other. But the two new mothers sitting in these seats were quite comfortably and happily having a chat the entire time I was here. For all the self-conscious “conversation areas” I’ve seen in libraries and elsewhere, this might be one of the most successful. It’s quirky, interesting, and completely conductive to long conversations, particularly placed as it is by the window. It’s interesting that they didn’t try to put seating right up against that terrific windnow, but I guess this way the whole space shares it uninterrupted.

And on the other side of Tinderbox’s front till:

I genuinely don’t know what they thought was going to happen here, but I’m fascinated. I’m not sure why you would put a cushion down on a place where, if you tried to lean back, you’d end up with a wooden corner digging into your spine. But I like the built-in table and the sheer uniqueness of this thing. It’s the opposite of the booths; wide open and tiered, visible to everyone walking in, perched above the crowd. I’ve seen steps in use as seating areas all over the place, so I can see the appeal of adding them as deliberate seating.

And in front of the cash and the pastry case, traditional bar seating, facing a small patio area.  No power that I saw, just a simple wooden ledge-table and stools. Interestingly, as with many spaces like this, patrons feel free to strike up conversations, often with one person standing and another sitting. Personally, I really like seating like this in areas where patrons frequently need help and input from staff, because of the ease with which a standing person can interact with a seated patron. It looks and feels natural.

I think, as far as cafés go, the variety of spaces contained within Tinderbox is closer to a library than any I’ve ever seen. But its touches are more homey and quirky than libraries tend to be. It’s small, cozy, warm (lots of wood filling up what is essentially an industrial space), with low ambient lighting but good task lighting. Librarians tend to design things in orderly lines, with bright spaces we can easily peer into to ensure that the right kinds of activity are going on. We design spaces that are less quirky and more efficient. I understand why students choose to work at Tinderbox; it covers all the bases. It’s homey and comfortable without being a junky living room. It’s an interesting mix of shared spaces, any of which can turn into collaborative ones.

Another place I got a look at today is a co-working space down the street from Tinderbox called The Hub Islington.

I didn’t take this picture. I was there, but I didn’t want to bother the full house working there at the time, so I’ve borrowed this one. The Hub is a co-working space on the top floor of an old warehouse in Angel. It’s designed by and for freelancers who want an office to go to rather than sitting at home all the time. They apply and pay a fee to work here. If we want to learn anything about deliberate choices of the best working spaces, co-working collectives might be the best place to turn. Not only because the people who use them tend to be innovative and design-oriented, but also because these are road-tested, and people vote not only with their feet, but with their membership fees.

The Hub Islington co-workers hotdesk. Hotdesking means that no one has a permanent desk; you choose the kind of spot you need when you need it and set up there. Therefore the Hub includes a variety of different kinds of spaces for the co-workers to shift between. The petal-like desks and chairs on casters allow each person to set up laptops as they like and need. Without monitors on the desks, they can pick how much open desk space they want at any give time. It also means they can deliberately work with someone else close by, or more independently. I like the way they have connected pieces as well as independent pieces; it makes “zones” out of thin air, and stops the place from being a hive of cubicles.

The Hub Islington includes a “library” (a nook in the left corner, by the windows, with two walls covered in books and cushioned benches. Because the library is a bit obscured, I think this space might fill the gap for those who want to work in a public place with a bit more privacy. Maybe for intensive thinking, or other kinds of private, quiet time. The Hub also includes a kitchen, and a dining booth area, presumably for having lunch as well as for impromptu brainstorming.

There’s a running thread in these chosen spaces of “home” metaphors. But it’s not like taking someone’s house and making it a public space; it’s not like an Ikea show room. It’s home with a significant professional twist. In fact, I’m starting to think that “home” isn’t the right metaphor, given how far afield these spaces get. People generally don’t have spaces like this in their home. The idea of a couch, a kitchen table, the ability to shift from one kind of space to another, that’s some of the home-ness of it. But the layout and structure itself is far from “living room” or “dining room”. The idea of “home” imparts the idea of different kinds of comfortable space, but it’s more formal than home. It’s just a more thoughtful office space, really.

Co-working spaces traditionally contain a conference room as well, like any other worksplace, as this one is no different:

It’s a dining room metaphor. This is a space you use when you’re deliberately in meeting mode. This space has a door on it that can be closed, unlike any other part of the space.

These are two spaces that have been deliberately chosen by those doing individual work. The first was designed by business owners developing a commercial enterprise; the second, by co-workers themselves, originally drawn on the floorboards in chalk. Both are an interesting mix of comfort, connection to other people, ability to share with close collaborators or friends, and a strong thread of individual space.

So these are the kinds of spaces that people chose for themselves: no individual offices, and no permanent stations, no complete privacy. There’s a connection to other people there, always, even if you’re not speaking to those people, or know them at all. They aren’t silent spaces, but they’re not excessively loud, either. They both have a buzz of work going on, in and around the casual talk. They are both flexible spaces, not because the furniture necessarily shifts around a lot, but because it supports a wide range of different kinds of activities, individual and collective, and the ethos of the space embraces the idea that different moods, tasks, or projects need different kinds of configurations, different furniture, and different affordances. In both, you’re not stuck in one kind of chair looking at one kind of view for all the work you do. You get to choose.

There is a monumental shift going on in computing. It’s a technical change, a software change, and most importantly, a change in the way we think about and approach a computing device. This change has to do with what a computer is.

We’re familiar with the more radical end of this change as the smart phone revolution. It used to be we had two very distinct devices: a computer (which sat on a desk, had a screen and a keyboard, and required us to bring a chair up to it so we could rest our fingers against the keys) and a phone (which could be attached to the wall, sit on a table, or, eventually, fit into our pockets, has small keys, or, increasingly, software-only keys). The rapid merging of these two devices has left us with some very confused metaphors for computing. As librarians, we’re not entirely sure anymore how to signal to a patron that we have set aside a device for their use. We set up computing so that patrons can use them, but we struggle to break free from the workstation metaphor, even when it would behoove us to do so.

A catalogue-browsing station at the Idea Store Whitechapel. The attempt is clearly there to get rid of the workstation and move into a more flexible approach to bringing digital search and information into the physical world, but of course you still need a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor, right? (Horseless carriage, anyone?)

Not to point fingers only at the Idea Store. This is tough, a lot of people are struggling with it. This is a tough one. But this terminal is just a stand up desk, really. You can’t put your stuff down on a table, and you can get stuck in for the afternoon of checking your email and writing an essay. It’s not comfortable enough to be a workstation. It says, “You, patron, may use this computer to do simple things, like looking something up.” Patron in that case is most definitely singular.

Here’s the not-especially-innovative interactive stations outside the Barbican library. Here we haven’t even moved away from the idea that you have to sit down to interact with digital media. At least they’ve got those steampunk keyboards with the included mouse to avoid all the extra wires. Rollerball for the win!

Once again, the layout is telling us how many people should be using these stations; one person per. If you were to bring the second chair over to look at something with a friend, you’d be depriving someone else of the use of a machine. Without intending to, we shout out our belief that computers are single-person items.

Everybody really likes the idea of bringing digital information into an experience; there’s just so much of it, and there’s no way any space, library, museum, or otherwise, can have any hope at all of bringing all or even most of it to its patrons without using screens. But very often you can see innovative spaces, like the Victoria & Albert Museum here, resorting to screens and chairs, in keeping with ye olde workstation metaphor. Is this the best way to bring digital information to patrons? It’s certainly the easiest. And the simplest for the patron to understand.

And not to say that these stations aren’t interesting and thoughtful; a lot of them are. These are the Crossrail information terminals at the Idea Store Whitechapel. As profiles go, these are pretty slim. For a workstation that’s been straightened out so you can approach them while standing as use them, yeah, they’re great. But this metaphor is wearing very, very thin. One person per screen, please. We started out that way in computing, and we keep reproducing it.

This is a really nice monitor/keyboard/rollerball mouse set up at the Central Library in Cardiff. That’s my friend Imogen; she went straight for the keyboard, because it was there, so she assumed it was required to use the machine. That’s a touch screen, though, as I showed her. (I can tell it is: of course it is! It’s high tech! This is a standing totem terminal, of course it’s a touch screen!) Because the affordances of the set up return the patron back to the workstation metaphor, all the interesting affordances of the touch screen go flying out the window.

The touchscreen, which replaces the keyboard and the mouse pretty effectively, is not a new technology anymore, and a lot of libraries (and museums, and all kinds of other spaces) have them. But libraries may be the last ones holding on so strongly to the keyboard. I understand why we do it; it’s true that you have a lot more scope with a keyboard. You can short-circuit whatever the designer thought you were going to do at this terminal with a keyboard and do what you need to do. It’s flexible. It makes that terminal ready for anything, and we really like to be ready for anything. We hate restricting what a patron can do. But unfortunately that flexibility  puts the device, and by extention the patron, in a very tight metaphorical box. In trying to make sure a patron can do anything they want, we often don’t use contextual and layout clues help them do the thing they’re probably there to do.

Here in the National Portrait Gallery they’ve got images, objects, and digital information all threaded together. The digital information is relevant and interactive, though interactive in a very limited way. But it’s not pulled out and stripped of its context, which is key. It’s the [read more] of the museum world, attached to the exhibit without overwhelming it. The patron has navigated to this piece of information not through clicking through a web page, but by physically moving through the building. Because of the physical location of the patron, we can make all kinds of assumptions about what information they want or need. It’s those few steps before search that they’re tying into here; anticipating information needs and incorporating them into the space itself. That device on the Henry VIII portrait isn’t as flexible  as the terminals with keyboards above, which can do absolutely anything, but it’s more targeted, specific, and in that moment, useful. It’s not expecting the patron to do any work at all. There’s no keywords, because the patron has indicated the keywords by moving to this point of the museum.

This is a fully interactive totem terminal at the Barbican, designed specifically to gather feedback from users. There’s no question that that screen is a touchscreen (obviously). No keyboard, you’ll notice. No mouse. (You don’t need a mouse with a touchscreen, because your finger is the cursor.) It’s not a computer you can hijack to check your email or jump into a search engine. It has one purpose, and it does that one purpose well. As computing has become cheaper and cheaper over the years, we’ve had more opportunities to include computing with limited purposes like this one. I think we often fail to notice that computing has become cheaper, and thus our relationship to it can now change. When a computer cost you five thousand dollars at minimum, it made sense that you wanted it to be as flexible as possible.

But that might not but the problem; lots of libraries have catalogue-only computers. We tend to make them stand up terminals to express this, and lock the software so that only that one activity is possible. We get the idea of the single use computer, we just haven’t made the jump to creating things like this:

I found this Jobpoint terminal at the St. Pancras Library in Islington. It’s a small library attached to a branch of the borough council, which offers a range of services to residents, from issuing parking permits to housing benefits. The jobpoint is, as the name suggests, an interface to view job postings. Public libraries are frequently the centre of support for job seekers, but I haven’t seen such a sophisticated job searching terminal before. No keyboard, no mouse, but there is a small printer.

This is a terminal that’s sensitive to its context; job seekers can print out the details they need of a job that interests them. This terminal brings the riches of one particular database to its userbase, and one which, in this case in particular, isn’t well-known for being especially computer-savvy. Now that I’ve seen this one, I’m surprised that catalogue terminals in libraries don’t look more like this. The needs are strikingly similar. Minus the workstation metaphors, you can see how much easier it would be to provide support to someone using a terminal like this. It’s design doesn’t tell you how many people can use it at once the way a keyboard and a mouse do. It doesn’t invoke a private, personal computer. Anyone walking up to it knows it’s not somewhere they can sit down and read a book, or work on their essay, or send some email. It’s computing, but it’s not a computer the same way catalogue terminals often are.

I keep looking for the holy grails of collaborative-friendly computing spaces, and they are few and far between. I know they exist, I’ve only just started my explorations, but even seeing attempts has been helpful to framing what it is we’re doing, and how we might consider creating different kinds of spaces and interfaces.

I visited another high-tech place this week, which looked like this:

As we know, the TARDIS can be operated by a single person. It’s a Gallifreyan workstation, as it were. But we know it works better with a crowd.

I’ve decided to call this a lecture bench. Sit down, select your content, listen while you look upon the objects described. Two birds with one stone: learn something, and have a rest. (Hey: those floors are really, really hard. Everyone’s feet need a rest in big museums!)

It’s an audio brochure controlled by a touch screen and delivered through a set of headphones.

This is the high-tech version, I discovered later, because of the touch screens and the fancy headphones. (Is it only me, or does sharing headphones seem a little…intimate? Headphones seem like a personal item to me, for the most part. I’d rather plug in my beats, but maybe that’s just me.)

This is, I think, the older version of the lecture bench. You hold the big plastic handset to your ear to listen whilst sitting on this lovely leather bankette. No touchscreen control, you’ll notice. Just some knobs.

Museums are unique in that people come to see their stuff, and if their stuff were converted entirely to digital stuff, no one would visit anymore. Because the point really is to come see the stuff. Okay: maybe museums aren’t that unique, because a lot of people think the very same thing is true of libraries. But libraries don’t curate in the same way that museums do. Frankly I think that’s a bit of a tragedy. What these audio benches attempt to do is bring different media into the space to sit alongside the more physical objects. People don’t go to museums to listen to things, they think, but of course if someone’s there telling you all the interesting stories behind the objects you see, you absolutely are there to listen.

Here’s a very stripped down (and far less comfortable) version at the Wellcome Collection, with a telephone handset rather than headphones. What’s most interesting about this one to me is that the surface they’ve left for you to sit on sort of makes it look like you’re part of the exhibit when you sit down on it. As if you’re there to be looked at, with a label on the wall over your head. Not quite as inviting, obviously. But interesting.

At the Natural History Museum, they’re trying a similar thing through QR codes. You can look at the skulls and minerals and models of ancient animals while you’re there, but they want to knit more context and more information into them. There is so much information, and it seems like everyone is trying to find ways to knit it into a physical experience. You can’t write entire monographs on the walls. People won’t read that much text. It’s very interesting to see the variety of ways curated spaces are trying to bring digital media into their midst.

This is my very favourite bit of fully collaborative digital space: it’s the interactive exhibits at the Museum of London.

Simple, eh? Not much to it, really. It’s only a white table. Just a white table, with all the digital content projected from the ceiling. It’s really fascinating to watch people interact with it. Because they don’t behave towards it they way people tend to when they’re working with a computer. Here’s a woman with her young daughter experimenting with it.

Good collaborative design just works. It doesn’t require anyone to think too hard about the fact that there are two people giving input to a computer. It’s open, inviting, and no one feels odd about someone else joining them in the experience, very much unlike a workstation situation. There’s no over-the-shoulder issues here. It’s comfortable to work with as a group.

If you listen, you’ll notice that every time the system recognizes someone’s touched the controls, it makes a sound. They all do this, very subtly, but it really gives the systems a sense that they are physical rather than only digital. They are only digital. It just doesn’t feel like it.

The Museum of London constructed their interactive exhibits very, very carefully. They are extremely thoughtful and fit fluidly into the displays.

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The tables displaying materials are clearly designed to also incorporate a space for digital material to be projected from above. Interestingly, the staff are under the impression that the table is touch sensitive, but it’s actually not. (I tested it!) It’s all being controlled by the projector; it can tell where your fingers are. It’s no ipad, but it’s pretty close in terms of responsiveness.

This bit of projection is on a much smaller table, and it’s a bit of a wedge shape. The projection and the design of the content is made to fit. There are physical objects on one side, and digital material right next to it. No screen, no keyboard, just simple, digital content I can flip through without reading instructions. This is genuinely doesn’t feel like working with digital content.

I really love these. The pieces of it are really fairly simple; it’s the design of the tables, installing the projector and the computer in the ceiling, and, of course the coding of the material. I keep thinking, we have content management systems like Drupal that will let us manage website content; it’s a short step to having a content management system for spaces like this. Imagine a space like this for a reference desk, rather than another bloody workstation. You could plug in a keyboard if you really had to.

Projection isn’t the future of touch screens. LCD screens are tons better for clarify and crispness, and even for responsiveness, in the end. But projection lets you do the interesting shapes and massive sizes on the cheap.

This is a video playing on a huge patch on a table. That’s simple and cheap to do with projection. It would be crazy expensive to do with an LCD screen right now. This way, they can easily adjust the size and location of the projection within the museum for practically nothing. An LCD screen, while a better piece of technology, simply isn’t that flexible. It’s also harder on the eyes, truth be told. A projection is a fairly gentle kind of light. As long as the video doesn’t require HD or too many fine details, a basic projection will work just fine.

And an LCD screen is just not going to let you make a round interactive space. This is a simulated fountain, where, from all points of the table, you can touch the various fish to get more information. It works from every side, which means you can have multiple people interacting with it at once. And no one here considers the fact that they’re interacting with a computer. No one even looks up to see it up there.

I really love the work the Museum of London has put into these really innovative computing spaces. They’re demonstrating something really valuable and important here. If you want people to feel comfortable walking up to a display of digital information with no preconceptions about how they’re meant to use the space, you have to break the rules and create something that doesn’t look like a workstation. Workstations don’t fire the imagination, and they aren’t especially approachable. They dictate the kind of work that can be done at them.

I know it’s not comfortable to do any lengthy computing while staring down at a table. This is why I’m not convinced the tables formerly known as Surface (now called PixelSense) are as functional as they should be. But I think, if we want people to be able to, say, search through digital materials with the aid of someone else, or with a group of classmates, we need to break down some barriers to make it easier and more natural. The examples at the Museum of London are spectacular.

These are interesting, so I can’t help but keep snapping pictures of them and writing about them. Help points, or reference desks, or information desks: they are common in a variety of different locations, and they wear so many guises. At the Apple store, they did away with the furniture and turned a massive staff into uniformed, technologicaly-equipped help points themselves. To be honest I’m undecided on how well that works. It works when the staff come to you exactly when you need them, switching the tables on “just in case” information points. (In the Apple store, the information points come up to you!) What’s required to make that work is a) uniforms, and b) a tremendous number of staff. Have you ever counted how many staff there are in an Apple store? It’s twice as many as you think. And then there’s the people behind the scenes we don’t even see.

For locations who can’t hire that many staff, or who can’t dictate a uniform for the staff they, furniture and lighting often steps in to create an obvious, approachable point for people to find and move toward when they have a problem or a question.

Here’s the main desk at the Victoria and Albert Museum:

I know a lot of forward-thinking librarians are anti-desk. Especially anti-big-desk, and anti-“just in case” staffing. I can’t stay I’m anti-desk or pro-desk. I don’t think these things can exist without a solid, proactive service model behind it, and I think whether a space requires a designated desk, and what kind of designated desk in that case, is entirely dependent on the context of the institution. If it’s purpose is to act as that gravitation point, almost like a meeting place, an architectural feature so obvious you can’t miss it if you tried, ideally tied to a well-considered service model, a giant yellow desk might be just what you need. If your space requires a staffed visibly beating heart, then you might as well take to 11. That’s obviously the direction the V&A took.

You cannot miss this information desk at the V&A. For one, it’s glowing yellow. If you had to direct someone to it from another part of the building, it would be pretty easy to know you’ve found the glowing yellow desk. The second key element of this desk, for visibility, is the outrageous light fixture above it. I’ve seen this trick on a much smaller scale in a variety of other libraries over the last few years; when you want a space to be designated as unique by your patrons, one way you can do it is with big, bulky furniture. Another is with dramatic lighting.You really can’t miss this blown-glass bit of drama:

Nobody’s missing that. These are all visual cues to highlight a point in the building where patrons should direct their attention. Given the size and scope of the building, the drama of their help points has to step it up and make a scene.

But as I said, context is everything. There are many other interesting forms of help point. This one is in the gift shop of the National History Museum:

These are tills. They’re small, unlike the glowing yellow desk at the V&A. They’re slick and low-profile in a tight space, but right smack in the middle of the merchandise. It’s impossible to miss them, in spite of the fact that they’re not flashy, glowing, or under a halo of tremendous lighting. The Natural History Museum is a building dominated by stone. It’s got a very obvious look about it, and hasn’t especially modernized all that much.

So those ultramodern, slick, white pods in this space really stick out.

It’s all fine and good to have easy-to-find tills in a gift shop, or a glowing yellow front desk in a large, well-regarded museum. But what about places where there isn’t one obvious front door, or one big foyer? What about big, sprawling spaces where different kinds of help are required all over the place?

This is a help point inside the tunnels of the tube. You find them all over once you get down into the many tunnels that lead from one line to another. It’s the physical version of the online help chat widget we place on pages of the library’s website; press the blue button if you get lost and want some help working out where you should be heading. Unlike the Apple store, Transport for London doesn’t have enough staff to litter help through the miles of tunnels, stairs, escalators and elevators that make up the London Underground system. But you can access someone by pressing a button.

These are obviously not as friendly or approachable as dramatic, staffed desks. There’s no one smiling at you, encouraging you to come over. But it’s all about context; most people walking very quickly through these tunnels knowing exactly where they’re going and don’t need the extra obstacle of a desk, a smiling face, or fancy lighting. Context really is everything.

These don’t fit into any particular theme or category. It’s just some stuff I thought was cool.

This is the front reception/information desk and the box office at the British Library. I really dig the projected clock on the wall behind them. When I saw it, I wondered if they projected messaging up there as required as well. But thye were pretty busy, so I didn’t ask. Cool, though! Simple projection!

Video booth at the Wellcome Collection. You don’t exactly stick your head inside, but it’s tilted forward to keep the sound mostly limited to the area right around it. It also provides a bit of glare protection and dimmer lighting so the video is clearer.

Biometrics exhibit at the Wellcome Collection.  It checks your height, your heart rate (you stick your finger into one of the holes in the wall, a light flashes above it to show you which one), it scans your retina, and more to create a mandala of your biometric information. The touch screen wasn’t very sensitive, but I was impressed that it could collate so much information about me without human intervention.

Display case at the Wellcome collection. It’s got digital information on display along with physical objects. I thought that was pretty cool, displaying digital information as objects, bits and pieces.

Person-free help point. These terminals are all over the Library of Birmingham. It’s a touchscreen, but there’s also a keyboard. Librarians are nothing if not thorough. Iti provides basic information about the building, what’s going on, and where to start on your project.

Video terminal in the National Portrait Gallery. It’s placed thematically with the physical collection, but lets you see things it’s hard for the gallery to display well or safely. In this case, it’s a display of miniatures. While we tend to think of computers as open-ended things that can be a portal for the patron into a world of any and all information, there’s something to be said for adding restrictions. This terminal doesn’t do everything. It only shows one particular collection.

I also really like that the signage information is painted directly onto the wall. That’s something galleries always do and libraries almost never do (but probably should consider doing).

The street is actually called Navigation Street, but this bus stop totem in Birmingham really impressed me. It’s awfully classy that it tells you how many minutes away the buses are from you, but it seems like a perfect opportunity to give people some actual navigation information as well. London has non-digital totems that show you a map with all the major landmarks in the vicinity, and a nice yellow YOU ARE HERE blob on them. It seems like these could do a good service being both a bus notification system, a map, and possibly provide some basic directions to things people are likely looking for.  Talk about way-finding!

We are creatures who like privacy and autonomy. We like to have bounded space when we sit down to do individual work, demonstrating the clear line between what’s mine to use and what’s yours to use. We appreciate not having to fight someone’s elbows or stage our things elaborately to maintain a respectful distance. Successful space planning accounts for this, and carves out spaces that are at least hinting that, while seated at them, you can pretend that you’re alone and not sharing space.

Do we hate sharing space?

Maybe it’s just that the rules are clearer with spaces like the one pictured above. It’s small, yes, and it’s not the most comfortable, but it has everything you need: a place to put your backside down, a flat surface to rest your elbows, computer, or book, power, and, nicely, a view. It’s facing away from other people, from the traffic directly behind you. Once seated, you assume the don’t bother me stance.

This space is in the Library Store Whitechapel (which is, let me underscore once again, amazing). It’s one of many like it, and this was the only one I could find that wasn’t occupied. The rules of this seat are fairly obvious: it’s empty, take it. You don’t need to answer to anyone. Do as you will. I must say, coming from Canada, I was really surprised to see such a tiny space. It really goes to show how lucky we are when it comes to space; the US study space standard seems much bigger to me, but this is what patrons in London are happy to find.

While it seems obvious to anyone that human beings tend to prefer individual spaces to shared ones, I think the story is quite a bit more complicated than that; as a culture, I think we actually love shared space, as long as it’s well-designed and accounts for our needs. How else to explain why some spaces (like libraries) are often packed, but computer labs nearby are empty? If no one’s in them already, no one wants to be in them. at the UTM library, we have students sitting on the floor in the library, together, while computer labs in the building next door sit open and entirely empty. People tend to like to be where other people are, but like to maintain their own sense of space and autonomy while there. That’s the fine line we need to walk when considering spaces for people.

This is a study area in the Canada Water library. There are, I think, some fatal flaws in the design of this library, but you can see all the attempts to make it more user-centered and thoughtful. These study spaces are one of those thoughtful pieces, even though there are some critical problems with it.

The study spaces are simply a long ledge built into the wall along the very top level of the building, looking over the collection. Again, the posture you assume seated at this study area is don’t bother me. You’re facing out, not inward toward your neighbours or toward anyone coming up the stairs. You are looking outward, there is a sort of visa in front of you, and you are winged on each side by spaces doing the same thing. I really like this approach. I think it tells you that it’s a silent study area without you having to articulate it in words.

What’s also interesting about this study space is the absolute lack of barriers between one study area and another. I’m not sure what to think of that, but I could see, walking through this area (it was very hard to find a place to get a shot of it, because it was packed) that everyone respects that tiny strip of wood that marks the line between your space and my space. Barriers would make the space uglier, and I’m not sure whether or not patrons would appreciate them or not. Those might be one of those things we feel like people want, but maybe they don’t. The patrons who use this space will use it for shorter spans of time than, say, a staff member seated at her desk day in and day out. The privacy needs here might be lessened because of that. It might be that all you need is to designate the line so that no one fights for space. As I said, this area was very popular.

It’s fatally flawed, though, because the area below, quite bizarrely, contains the children’s library. So they have children’s programs going on underneath the noses of a bunch of students doing their homework. Not ideal. But I think study areas like this overlooking collection spaces could work really, really well in areas where that collection space is not a noisy location.

This is a really difficult library to photograph, but as you can see here, the band of wall above hides the study space that ring the whole floor, all facing outward, and there’s low collection and tables below. I suspect if it weren’t for the children’s area, this set up would work well. I love how tucked away they are. It seems like the perfect teen homework zone; it’s a cozy nook at the top of the library, it’s got a view peering down at the rest of the world going about their business, keeping it from being lonely and depressing. There’s power outlets, and at the first floor, at the centre of this library, a full cafe, the smell of which drifts up to the top floor. (That seems like a mistake and possibly a problem with the A/C, but when it’s cookies and coffee, it’s kind of an interesting design choice, really.) Teens and cats; both apparently fans of hidden, high places with a view.

Another, less successful teen study area. I say less successful mostly because I was able to take a photo of it. (I try not to get patrons into photos as much as I can, though I am always taking these pictures with the permission and full awareness of the library staff.) This  space is in the new Idea Store Watney Market in Shadwell, which is a short walk from the Whitechapel branch. This branch is nowhere near as busy as the Whitechapel Idea Store, but there were a few teens here when I visited. But they were seated in computer area to the right of this area, which looks down into the beautiful glassed-in stairwell, using individual work spaces as communal ones. This area is lovely, with really nice chairs, but the table is too narrow, the space you can take up too undefined, and you’re face is practically pushing up against nothing but wall. You still get the sense that this is individual space rather than collaborative space, but I’d imagine this is the last space that will get claimed. It’s just too difficult to use. Small can work, but it has to be the right kind of small.

Individual computing, Canada Water library. I’m genuinely conflicted about this. It’s a good use of space, and clearly in use. I like the barrier-free look, but is it comfortable when someone is sitting directly across from you, and you run the constant risk of staring meaningfully into a stranger’s eyes?

Individual computing, Idea Store Whitechapel. No chance of an accidental staring contest here. Sorry it’s so dark; it was a beautiful, bright day. As you can see, once again, it’s a small space you get to claim, by North American standards. There isn’t a lot of room to spread out. But, thoughtfully, these are spaces for spreading out. These are spaces for sitting in front of a computer, not for laying out an outline or working with books. I appreciate the varied approaches to respecting that difference in that activity. Not all spaces need to conform to all needs. Also, thoughtfully, this is a space that looks outward, underscoring the individual nature of the work they expect will go on here. I’d worry about glare, but to be fair, this isn’t the sunniest country in the world. I say that with affection.

What I remain deeply interested in is the other ways to create individual spaces, the more challenging ways. I genuinely don’t know if this will work, but history says it has worked in the past, and there seems to be a kind of pendulum-swing in attempts to bring it back. The communal table.

Most shared tables look like this one at the Idea Store Whitechapel. Notice there’s suddenly a lot more room per person; when you’re sitting at a table, you need to designate more room to make people feel more comfortable sitting there on their own doing their own work. This still isn’t a collaborative table; the chairs are too far apart. Notice the only patron in this area chose the narrower table that’s looking out, more easily self-defined.

We used to get a look of mileage out of reading rooms. In my own experience at UTM, reading rooms can quickly turn into cafeterias, shouting, pizzas and all. Is there still a place for these kinds of shared tables?

This is an advertised Communal Table in a bakery/café in Hampstead, just down the road from my flat. It’s never for one party, it’s always for individuals or pairs who end up sharing a table like a family. The staff facilitate this by seating you there, which takes away some of the awkwardness. It’s not designed for small groups, though; it’s designed to get strangers to interact with each other, if they’re willing to. Or not; sit and have your coffee, read a book. But you’re part of a greater whole when you sit here with others. You’re part of a community.

Because of the wide variety of activities that take place in a library, libraries need to contain a wide variety of kinds of space. Individual work space that shows in its design that it’s for individuals studying is critical; but keeping it somehow connected with the life of the space going on around it seems key. Large shared space seems to be coming back, perhaps in part because it’s more flexible. These shared tables can work for individual study, or for collaborative groups of all kinds, depending on need. I’m looking forward to seeing more spaces that fit into this spectrum.

I’d heard that Marks and Spencer had some interesting computing set ups in some stores, so I was keeping my eyes open for them I finally stumbled across one yesterday.

It’s quite something. It’s three stations; one, a proper workstation, very slightly reconstructed to function as a pubic terminal (in the middle, with the attached keyboard), and two computers set up to look like giant iphones. Giant iphones on which you can a) scan through everything you can buy from M&S, which is a lot, b) scan the barcode of a product you have in hand at the store, and b) order products and pay for them on the device using your credit card.

What M&S is doing here is pretty analogous to what we do with computing in libraries; there is a collection all around you, but you can access it digitally as well. And, with the barcode reader, the two can interact.These are custom computing devices to help branch the physical and the digital world, and nicely-thought out ones at that. When I first saw it, I wondered if they were trying to highlight the fact that you don’t actually need to come into the store, you can order everything you want online and have it delivered, but I think it’s more than that. It’s offering a new dimension of service to people who are physically in the building.

I haven’t yet seen libraries branch into shifting the metaphor from sitting down at a workstation to an app-like experience like you see here. It might be too early for the general population, but I can’t see why you wouldn’t try, and why it wouldn’t work. Look at the difference between the set ups; the keyboard and mouse seem so clunky next to the slick faux-iphone. I flipped through the options a bit on the touch screen while I was there, and it was very much like scanning through a paper catalogue. It’s a jump ahead in that it’s bringing the digital version of the shop into the physical shop, but it’s also a return to the paper catalogue, just in digital form, with the ability to order without looking away from it. That seems really accessible to me.

I’m always interested in how well-considered technology like this works on the ground, and unfortunately I didn’t manage to witness anyone trying to use these. (I might have to go back and watch.) What’s really nice about them is how really approachable they are; it would certainly be easier to use the touch device with a friend or a staff member than the keyboard and mouse set up. It’s lower, it’s pointing up at you, it’s got smooth, broad edges so that people can gather around it. The screen is bigger. The software is clear, simple, and beautiful. It’s not the same thing as a regular computer. It barely feels like a computer at all, in the same way that a phone is a phone in our minds, not a computer. Would something like this have a place in a library?

We’d have to consider what it’s for. Because it’s not a generic computer that a patron could use for whatever they like, the purpose and use has to be crystal clear. Is it for browsing the collection? Is that a short-term activity, or a longer-term one? These computers are set up primarily for people who know what they’re looking for and want to find/order it. They even appear to be for people who have an item in hand and want to order a variation of it. It’s a very specific need that’s filled here. (You could browse the whole collection here as well, conceivably, but isn’t that better done at home sitting on the couch?) Libraries definitely have their specific-need patrons as well; reserve materials, textbooks, looking for a specific book or article. Is something like this helpful? We certainly have a lot of computers in libraries. The way these ones are set up, they don’t let people convert them into email-checking machines. They’re single-purpose; browsing and ordering from the collection. That’s all.

Though, when you think about it: it would be interesting if a device in a library could be a springboard off of I want something like this. Scan a LC call number or a barcode and see everything in that narrow band for browsing. That might be a way to help incorporate our digital materials into a physical space.  Physical books would then act as placeholders, the beginning of a journey into the physical and the digital at once. A reference collection could even double as the show collection, really (since it’s a miniature version). Patrons could bring their own books in, too. Or you could type in a title, I suppose, as you can do at these M&S terminals. It’s like a variation on a search term, like searching via photograph. Search via book metadata, without ever really knowing what that metadata is. I want more like this. That’s sort of interesting.

It’s a cross-over between what can physically sit in a building and what’s available. I found this set up in M&S next to the underpants section. If you found a pair of underpants or a bra you liked but wasn’t in your size, you could order what you wanted directly from the computers here. It’s hard to say where that’s heading, really. Will people go for that? Will they eventually discover that they can do without the physical analogue as a starting point? (It seems, largely, that that’s what’s happening: online shopping statistics seem to go up and up and up every year.) What’s the future of shops like this? At the moment, this department store is still pretty crowded, and these digital ports were untouched while I was there. I’m not entirely sure it’s found it’s niche in this case. But I didn’t get to see it in use with a member of the staff. It might be that they walk customers through this when they have their heart set on something that isn’t in stock.

These two kinds of computing stations is, it seems to me, a physical manifestation of where we are at the moment when it comes to computing; the keyboard and mouse are slowly being replaced by something slicker, but not everyone’s entirely ready for it. In fact, most people aren’t; look at the signage over the standard monitor.  It looks as if they put the fancy iphone-like devices in, but people kept drifting toward the keyboard and mouse instead. So they had to highlight that you can get the same content from the computers on either side as well! When the first laptop came out without a floppy drive, it hurt, because floppy drives were still in use. But eventually no computer had one anymore. This feels like one of those moments. The keyboard-and-mouse metaphor, which is frankly quite difficult to understand since both are proxies (press a button to create a letter that builds words, move an object to move a arrow that stands in your finger), is so comfortable and familiar to us that we often prefer it even though it’s far more primitive. But I suspect that will ease off as we fall more and more in love with our smartphones. I think dressing that touchscreen up as a smartphone was a good idea, as it helps replace that keyboard metaphor with something equally ground into our consciousness.

I think commercial experiments like this have a lot of teach us in libraries. I’m going to keep my eyes open for more of these.

I was going to call this “reference desks,” but enough of the libraries I’ve visited have disposed of the phrase, and I don’t want to re-apply it. This is a key element of any library space, in my mind, and is something widely and diversely interpreted. There is the back and forth between being big and obvious (in terms of furniture) and being as unobtrusive as possible.

Look at this one! This is a “branch” help desk on an upper floor of the five-storey Idea Store Whitechapel. It closes up when not staffed. The Idea Stores can afford to have smaller furniture for staffed points for one big reason: the staff wear a uniform. As you can see, this staff member (who was so friendly and helpful, as well as very well-informed about the history of mission of Idea Stores generally, and articulate about it, which indicates lots of good strategic communication with staff from the leadership) is wearing a branded sweatshirt and a name tag. I didn’t question whether he was an employee on sight, regardless of the temporary look of this help point.

The Idea Stores really have it in for anything that smacks of a reference desk. In the children’s library in the Whitechapel branch, which has the collection on casters, this is what staff have as computing infrastructure:

In case it’s not clear, this is a computer in a lockable closet. I’ve seen this kind of thing as the “instant office” plugged by places like Ikea for better uses of limited space, but I’ve never seen one in a library before. As it turns out, these closet staff computing stations exist on all floors of the library. I saw another, closed, up on the top floor near the cafe as well. I presume the idea is that you pull it open when the need arises, but leave it shut otherwise.

Here’s the desk in the children’s library in the Idea Store at Watney Market:

It’s more of a desk than they have a Whitechapel, but not by much. The staff at this branch (also extremely helpful) might have thought I was visiting specifically to check out this particular desk, had lots of feedback for me about it. It didn’t have enough storage, for one.

“Storage for what?” I asked her.

“Paper. Membership forms. Just stuff!”

All of this is very telling to me about what we think a desk like this is for. 

This is a recently-qualified librarian perched on the stool at her help point in the “Surfing Space” at Watney Market Idea Store. They are, as you can see, small workstations that don’t encourage the staff to sit and scroll through the internet when bored. They aren’t designed for comfort. They are, in essence, quick look-up stations, for 5-10 minutes of computing at a time, not office areas with lots of desk space to spread out. Nor are they collaborative in any way. They are tools to help staff interact with the things staff have access to, in order to help patrons. The presumption of these spaces is that the real value in the interaction is going to happen between two people, with no real support from computing.

Okay, this isn’t a great picture to illustrate my point. This is from the Canada Water library, which I will talk about in more depth later. You may not actually see their reference desk in this picture, but it’s down the first set of stairs, and on the other side of the second set. See it? Same wood as everything else. It’s a big, round, traditional reference desk. However, in a epic attempt to have your cow patty and eat it too, the policy at this library is for staff not to stand behind the desk. I understand the impulse: the furniture is there, it can be useful visually, but you don’t really want staff to stand behind it picking their noses and waiting for someone to need them. It’s a waste of resources and doesn’t look very good to the patrons. But if the staff aren’t behind it, the signal that this is the place where you can get help is kind of muted by it being unstaffed. Or staffed by someone who is hidden somewhere in the stacks or by the windows.

As a profession, we have not solved the issue of computing, help, and desks. We have lots of ideas, and we know what’s wrong, but we’re not sure yet how to fix it. We’re at this very interesting juncture between recognizing the problem and finding the best solution, so there are an unlimited number of solutions in action, for better or for worse.

All of the help points that I saw presume that technology is something the staff can use to help them answer questions, but is not critical to the enterprise. These are public libraries; that might have something to do with it (but I doubt it). There is no sense in these spaces that help involves working together with computing. The furniture doesn’t allow it.

Perhaps that’s not what they want. It’s easy for me to stand back and say, “I couldn’t do good work with this space.” Though that’s true: I would struggle to do good work in these spaces, because the kinds of questions I need to answer don’t involve a standing person coming up to me to ask a question I can answer without them sitting down with me, opening up their own computer or taking control of one of mine, and walking through a process together. We’re at odds with how to integrate computing comfortably, without alienating patrons, setting up de facto workstations where staff ignore patrons (or seem to be), or play solitaire all day. It’s a challenge, and our metaphors have largely failed us.

The first step with any kind of space, any kind of application, service, or idea, has to be its core metaphor. We often don’t consider this, but everything has a metaphor, and that metaphor is what tells the user or patrons what that space, application, or service can do for them. A good metaphor helps people see the affordances of a thing so they can use it more naturally without having to dig for an instruction manual. My classic example of a watertight metaphor is email. If we called it server messages, that wouldn’t help anyone understand what they could do with it, but once you call it email, the metaphor does a lot of the explanatory work for us. You receive it email, send it, store it, throw it away. You get packages, you unwrap them. A tight metaphor can make the difference between an idea that soars and an idea that absolutely fails to catch on.

Libraries come with their own ready-made metaphor; libraries are a metaphor. Other systems and services use the concept of a library to explain the idea that key resources are stored in a place they can access. An image library stores imagines in a browsable format, a seed library stores a wide variety of seeds and makes them available, that sort of thing. That metaphor is useful in many ways, but it also limits what we can do as libraries. People come into a library with many, many preconceived notions. But if you want to reinvent yourself, you have to either stretch the existing metaphor (tricky and often limiting) or create/borrow a new one.

One of the metaphors that higher ed designers have been reaching for of late is “home.” What if the library is your home away from home? What if we designed spaces that looked more like your living room or your dining room? I’ve heard lots of arguments countering this direction, all of them perfectly fair. (Do we really want undergraduate students treating our library the way they treat their own living rooms? Probably not. Does it benefit the library to have a certain level or formality, even if it’s only a little bit of formality? Probably so.) That said, I still find this idea intriguing. My colleague Lauren Di Monte and I have discussed this many times; what if we could have a space to work in that was designed more like a home than like an office? It’s all the rage with high tech companies like Google and Airbnb. The advantages of it for us, as employees, seem obvious: a comfortable chat around a dining room table is more pleasant and relaxed than a conference room. Who doesn’t love working in a sunny kitchen? There’s no single desk in places like that, you pick up and move based on your needs. What if you hunker down and get work done in a place that looks like a living room instead of in a cubicle? Those kinds of spaces, it seems to me, lend themselves better to facilitating real collaboration. It doesn’t let you dig into your space and never come out. It forces you to tailor your location to your need.

The Idea Stores of Tower Hamlets, London, have taken this concept more to heart than any library I’ve ever seen. And to be clear: Idea Stores aren’t just libraries. They are libraries, they are definitely libraries, but they also offer courses and provide space for civic information needs and rentable interview rooms for local businesses, among other things. Idea Stores are what happen when you take a library, shake it out, and reconstruct it based on patron needs rather than tradition.

The metaphor you’d expect (as a North American) is retail, given the name. It’s an Idea Store, do you buy ideas there? Seems logical to my Canadian brain. But this is the UK, and they call their stores shops here. So it’s not an Idea Shop, it’s a Store of Ideas. A variation on the idea of “Library”, without all the connotations people bring to that word. Names and metaphors are cultural and specific, obviously. Idea Store Whitechapel went with a home metaphor. They want their patrons to feel at home there.

I really like this approach, for one giant reason: the longer I’ve been in librarianship, the more I’ve become aware of the fact that the #1 enemy of learning is fear. Everyone’s afraid. They’re afraid of failure, of looking stupid, their afraid of technology. This is the way we live our lives, it seems: battling fear. If you decide that your key goal in relation to your patrons is to first address fear, you can, in my experience, watch them go much further if you ignore their fear and consider them information-needy instead. Entirely different approach! I think the “home” metaphor, with all it’s dangers, is another way to address that core fear. If a place feels homey, that’s one step closer to opening patrons up to new ideas.

Idea Store Whitechapel is at once a little industrial in feel and also very approachably homey. The lighting is lower and dimmer, and the furniture is the same sort of thing you’d buy for your house. But it’s got an industrial-style flooring and exposed wooden beams. It’s not a perfect “home” replica, but the hints are there that it’s not your average library.

They stopped using library lingo. They actually stopped! They have no “Reference Desk,” but they have staffed spaces on every floor. The spaces vary, though: sometimes they look a bit like a traditional desk, but sometimes they’re just an opened out cabinet (more on that in another post). They don’t have “computer labs”, they have very well-used Surfing Spaces. (Bit dated, but I can appreciate their attempt to avoid ye olde library terminology.)  There are call numbers, but you can easily browse using the labels on the low shelves, like you would in a bookstore. I didn’t see the word “Circulation desk” anywhere. Lots of self-check machines, though. There are lots of book displays throughout the library, all based on relevant or quirky themes. (There was one of books with cult followings.) You can see and feel that this is a place designed around a patron’s experience rather than the comfort level of the staff. (Again: more on that later.)

Up on the top floor, with a really lovely view of Whitechapel and the Gherkin in the distance, they have a cafe. Not just a Starbucks like we have at home, but a actual cafe, where, until 11:30, you can get a full English Breakfast. I asked about their food policy, in case you were curious: no hot food in the rest of the library, but snacks are okay. And in the cafe, along with the cafe tables where people are eating? The most recent issues of magazines and newspapers, of course. So we have a kitchen and a dining room, and what’s next to that? A living room, with a big television. It’s got a viewing schedule as well, so you know what you’re in for when you sit down (they take requests). But it’s up on the top floor, where you need to at least acknowledge, at some point or other, that there are four floors of resources and services beneath you you might want to think about. We always put the cafe area up front, but I can see the upside of moving it to the top floor. You can’t smell the kitchen anywhere else in the library (unlike at the Canada Water library, which is a story for another post), you lure people up, just like they do in commercial settings, and you get a terrific view.

(Is there any way I can make afternoon tea, with scones, preserves, and clotted cream, happen in Toronto?)

I think the volume of traffic through the Whitechapel branch is telling of the success of its choices. I visited two more libraries today, and neither was as packed as Idea Store Whitechapel. Nor were the activities going on inside as diverse; I saw groups of men chatting at tables, groups of women chatting at tables, young adults studying, lots of women with babies. It really is their second home, and I think, in this context, that’s a good thing.

Just as I finished writing about the downsides of casters, I see an addendum about casters.

A collection on casters! This is in the children’s library in the Idea Store Whitechapel. (More on Idea Store, and the Whitechapel one in particular, shortly.) While I’m not that fond of casters generally, I have to say, this puts a new spin on the idea of mobile shelving. Mary Ann Mavrinac always said the goal of good library design is people space over collection space, and this is another example of that ethos. When people need it to, the collection slides out of the way.

For some time now I’ve been pondering the need to make a distinction between a space that’s flexible and one that’s furnished with chairs and tables on casters. Those two things are very often connected in our minds. We figure, if we fill a space with movable furniture, the space is thus flexible. Job done. The ease of casters has, to some extent, replaced the process of thinking creatively about the needs of our patrons and how our spaces can fit those needs.

I think we need to reconsider what the word flexible actually means to us when it comes to library space.

This perspective is mostly rooted in my disappointment in spaces furnished with chairs and tables on casters. We spend the money on the furniture in the hopes that it means we can reconfigure the space to our shifting requirements on the fly, and thus be truly flexible, but what seems to happen nine times out of ten is that the space gets colonized by students who need a place to sit down and work (no argument there), but they do so in a way that maximizes their personal space at the cost of having fewer bums in viable seats (again, no real argument there, I don’t blame them for doing it). The question in my mind is this: is the occasional legit need to reconfigure a space for an event or activity enough of a driver to accept the poor use of resources that kind of space tends to exemplify 98% of the time?

I suppose I’m being unfair to furniture on casters and the really functional spaces that contain it. It just seems to me that, wherever I go, I see the same story. In places where a library can afford to have two students take over a room that seats 20 without depriving anyone else, then I’m sure that’s fine. It’s wonderful if you can leave that much room for your students to construct the kind of space in which they want to work. It’s just that I’ve always worked in libraries where space is at too much of a premium to allow for that level of space-claiming. We have to get a bit more creative and a lot of more thoughtful.

What does flexible really mean? A flexible space is one where a patron can perform a number of tasks without the layout getting in her way.  A flexible  space can accommodate a wide array of activities. Maybe this is where we go wrong: we try to design spaces that can literally accommodate any kind of activity, from presentations and lectures to group work to silent study. From computer lab to video editing suite to gaming room. We try to ensure that our spaces can turn into absolutely anything in the blink of an eye. But what starts to happen is that a space becomes not terribly good at any of those things.

I’ve been looking really hard at some spaces that are far less movable but, to my mind, better at a series of related tasks. Less flexible than capable of absolutely any kind of activity, perhaps, but much better at the smaller range of options. It’s a matter of specializing; create a space that does really well at the smaller range of planned activities, and create other kinds of spaces to handle the rest.

This kind of planning requires a certain level of confidence. Patrons know their own work best, but we have to be confident about delivering spaces that will satisfy them. Perhaps that’s the crux of it; our hearts are in the right place when we make spaces that our patrons can turn into whatever they need, but it’s a position that lets us stay a bit farther removed from them. It doesn’t require us to dig in deep and find out what would help the patrons most, and design for it.

To my mind, the worst, least flexible, and least movable spaces are workstations. Desk with plywood privacy walls around it, Monitor, computer, keyboard, desk chair. The activity is designed for is obvious. (It reminds me of the perennial “Send us your PowerPoint slides” email for conferences or job interviews, making it almost mandatory that you use PowerPoint.) Desks with monitors on them are difficult to modify if you aren’t sitting down to do the exact kind of work the planner expected. It means keyboards shoved up under monitors, or textbooks lying on keyboards and practically DDoSing your library’s website by accident (true story!). It means groups of students huddled inside the privacy enclosure as best they can, trying to finish a project. Immovable, inflexible: the opposite of what I’m currently being inspired by and what currently works really well. But I don’t think the answer is to do the exact opposite.

Some of the best spaces I’ve seen so far are very much fixed. Coffee shops everywhere set up shared spaces for strangers to sit down, drink their coffee, eat their scone, and tap away at their computers. Those spaces are often small, individual tables for two, but are sometimes large tables shared by many. Two or three (or more) can sit down and share that space, but so can individuals. There is a science around how big a table has to be so that one group can’t dominate the space, and that’s got to be, to my mind, the most important science in library space planning, outside of accessibility concerns. One big solid table, well-powered, with comfortable chairs, is possibly the most flexible kind of space there is. Groups, workshops, individual study; it all works. You can’t fold it away and play charades in the space instead, though. You can’t do that. But because you can’t. you can lean in on that table, you can power it (it’s hard to have a table that is both on casters and powered), you can push against it. You can sit on it. There’s something very comforting and very functional about a big, solid table.

We are quickly reaching the point where everyone has their own computer or computing device. We’ve suspected for some time now that we may be the roadblock to students bringing their own computers to school with them; we provide so many, it’s hardly required. We keep (inflexibly) building in the computing instead of building spaces that are flexibly computing-friendly. As the needs of our technologies become increasingly ambient, we’re able to go back to spaces that actually look retro; like old school libraries used to look. Tables and chairs, reading rooms. Good, strong wifi in the space means computers will connect throughout; powered tables (all of them powered, with, ideally, USB power ports as well for phones and tablets as well) means the patron feels like they just hit the jackpot. A comfortable chair. (It’s almost impossible to have a chair that isn’t movable unless you bolt them down, which no one recommends anymore.) It’s one kind of space. It’s technology-friendly space, with no built-in technology. It lets the patron decide how and when to use technology, but relies on them to bring it.

I think the challenge to building truly functional, flexible spaces is in accepting that no space can accommodate every single imaginable activity. We have to be creative, thoughtful, and aware of the needs of our patrons in order to create not just “do whatever you want” space, but “you have the freedom to do what you need to do, and the existing infrastructure will support you” space. Sometimes solidity allows for more flexibility than casters can.

The purpose of this research leave is to look at the relationship between computing technology and space, and how those two things together either support or discourage people’s goals, creativity, and collaboration.  I could do this pretty narrowly, and given that I only have six months, I probably should, but I can’t help but notice the use of technology is all kinds of spaces, planned or otherwise.

There is an advantage to being away from home in this respect; you look at everything as a visitor, and being foreign opens your eyes to things you might not have thought remarkable otherwise.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that computing technology is everywhere. We have always been careful when we use words like “everywhere” and “everyone”, because not everyone had a laptop/tablet/phone, and there is that danger of marginalizing people and not taking account of the so called digital divide. Of course there are always outliers, but we’re very quickly approaching the point where we can say, without real apology, that everyone has some kind of computing device with them in all kinds of unlikely places. UTM Library’s wireless connection information cross-referenced with its headcounts and traffic data indicates that there are twice as many internet-connected wireless devices in the building than there are human beings. Computing devices are reaching a significant level of ubiquity, and it seems to me it would be foolish to start a project talking about computing and space without acknowledging that. Patrons come into libraries with devices, and I think we’ve reached the point where it’s safe to design spaces and services on the assumption that they will.

Devices are everywhere, and there are more and more kinds, shapes, sizes, and price points. And people love them. Is love the right word? Depend on them, at least. They serve as entertainment, communication media, navigation devices, and aids in preventing unwanted conversation or eye contact. They are calendars, email devices, music players, GPS units, books, and our entry into conversations with everyone we know.

It’s neither a surprise nor a revelation that there are always many devices on the tube.The fellow in the background reading the paper has a lot in common with the fellow sitting next to me reading a script. There’s a continuity there that makes brand new technologies slip very easily into this space; it’s a space where you need something to do to pass the time.

The tube is transportation, obviously, but more specifically it’s a waiting room. It’s a thin room where people wait until the doors open onto a place they need to be. It’s a space where people have to be, and congregate in large numbers. Complete strangers sit next to each other. The tube is often cramped, hot, and sometimes stalled. It’s a requirement of every day life, a habit that quickly loses any sense of wonder, novelty, or interest. London’s underground is a Victorian creation, certainly not designed for computing technology. And yet: if you want to take a photo of someone using a tablet or a phone, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better place.

As much as I’m interested in how we can design spaces that allow patrons to use technologies better, more freely, and more creatively, I have to start out by acknowledging that they will do so regardless of the design of the spaces.

Sometimes they’re barely designed at all.

This is Hampstead Heath. It’s a thousand-year-old, 790 acre park in North London, perched on its highest hills, looking down over the sprawling expanse of the city. Since the weather has been exceptionally mild since I arrived (I credit my sunny disposition for this, you’re welcome, London), it was hard to resist a traipse through it in the late afternoon. I quickly discovered that the Heath is well-supplied with 3G, because quite a number of people had their phones out. Chatting, checking email, or, if you’re me, snapping photos and sending them to your dad while carrying on a text conversation with him.

Even here, in this ancient green space, technology intrudes. Or accompanies, if we want to avoid the value judgement. Places like this can be a respite from the relentless speed of communication technology, the constant pressure to be paying attention, communicating, answering every call and question. It’s a breath of air in the middle of a busy, noisy, cramped city. But as I said, the Heath is 790 acres. It’s hilly and twisty. It joins Hampstead and Highgate, Golders Hill in the north to Gospel Oak in the south. It’s quite easy to get lost in there. It’s not a bad thing, really, to be able to reach into space and ping a satellite to help you find your way through it.

The paths inside the Heath are helpfully marked on Google Maps, and with the help of that 3G coverage, GPS will pinpoint precisely where on the Heath you are. You can use the device in your pocket not to distract you from the beauty of the Heath, but capture it, share it, discuss it, and help you navigate your way through it.

The model of the computer workstation has been at the forefront of our planning for technology use in libraries. It’s our core metaphor: everywhere you look, anywhere we think someone might need information, we insert a workstation. But our technology culture is changing fast. Spaces that were never designed for technology are becoming the perfect, most natural places for it. As computing devices get smaller, faster, and easier to integrate with the real world outside of a desk chair and a monitor, all spaces have the potential to become technology-rich, collaborative spaces.