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EJournal ARCHIVE
Read the issues you missed or didn't have time to finish. All past EJournals are here for you to re-read or forward to your colleagues.
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Borrow ideas from retail to brainstorm ways to display materials and enhance the visitor experience.
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Cromaine District Crossroads Branch Library in Howell, MI is actually located in a retail center and is designed as a flexible satellite space for popular materials that can easily be reconfigured to meet programming needs.
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Find inspiration and ideas in hotel lobbies
to adapt for library spaces that invite visitors to stay awhile.
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Museums offer great examples of learning experiences that can kick-start brainstorming.
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Cool, new
membership-based office
co-working spaces offer ideas for the design of similar areas within libraries. |
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In this issue, we continue our series on inspiration. Good ideas can come from anyone and often from seemingly unrelated sources. Being open to new ideas is important. We continue our search for inspiration in the places we visit when on holiday. Hotels, museums, retail shops, and even membership-based office spaces, can spark ideas for creative library spaces.
Joe Huberty | AIA | LEED AP BD+C | Partner |
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It turns out you cannot stop thinking about library design no matter where you are, even on holiday. Ideas are everywhere.
Travel, family expeditions and, of course, shopping can provide many examples of good design that can be borrowed and adapted to library purposes. It is important to remember that few, if any, of these inspirations translate directly from the source to your library. After all, each environment is designed for a specific purpose and few see the intensity of use, have the demanding technology requirements or seriousness of purpose of a library. But with that caveat in mind, there are many places we visit that offer some clues to designing spaces that a library user would find inviting, comfortable and useful. |
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The Store
The big take away is that we don't all know what we want or need when we walk into the library. The serendipitous find is more common than one would think. Making this happy accident occur is  not really such an accident. So next time you are in the store, think about your reactions to aisle width, end panel displays, presentation of merchandise and use your observations to drive up your circulation. This is an obvious one. It is one that likely as more science behind it than most realize. Retail environments, like all architecture, are as much or more about human behavior than about bricks and mortar. Classic retail models depend on the predictability of culturally defined habits.
Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, has conducted extensive analyis of how we navigate our way through various retail settings. He has studied arrival zones, how we decide which way to turn, what we do when we see someone in an aisle we want to enter, or when we notice and react to a sign. All of these components are manipulated by retailers to help us find what we were looking for and induce us to pick up that item we did not know we wanted. As part of a corollary study to his Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping [Simon & Schuster, 1999], Underhill was commissioned by four libraries in metro Chicago to perform a study of this retail behavior in library settings. The results are summarized in Best Practices for the Customer-Focused Library [Metropolitan Library System, 2008] and include a number of findings that are not surprising to Underhill but are usually surprising to libraries. |
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Travel
Travel is always an opportunity to see something new. Be it the airport (or better yet a European train station), the hotel, or some entertainment destination, there are fun examples of how to define the user experience. In the train station, the destination  board is a delightful piece of analog technology. Be it signage in the travel section, or an art installation that changes constantly based on activity within the library (think catalog numbers of items being checked out or energy use data on the building) this is signage that is art and art that can be signage. It can encourage people to think more about their surroundings, and their interactions with them.
At the hotel we are all used to some form of waiting area. Whether it is at check-in, meeting up with fellow travelers, waiting for a cab or just people watching, the hotel lobby can be the highlight of the stay. It can also be the most lonely and barren of spaces. The difference is the direct result of decisions made  about how the hotel wants people to behave in the space. Some spaces say "move along". Others say "sit, stay, or have a drink". Okay, what they say is "stay here and spend money" but how different is that from "stay here and read" or "stay here and create"? If you want people to use the resources you offer, they need to be comfortable. Beyond the right temperature and lighting, and a large enough chair, there are all sorts of visual clues we have been trained to detect subconsciously. And yes, size of chair is one of the clues, as is color, texture, furniture arrangement, and signs of hospitality (coffee, hearth, etc.). Next time you visit a cool hotel, snap some pictures: there might be something you can adapt to your library. |
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Destination Spots
Whether it is across the country or down the block, there are those destination places we all go for one reason or another. Many we visit to be entertained. Fun comes in so many forms... Maybe it's the spa.  Maybe it's the children's museum. We'll focus on the children's museum! If you go, bring a kid, as many places don't let you in without one. When you get in, you will have it: proof that fun and learning are one and the same and that many interactive exhibits do not need electricity or a giant budget. The really good ones have straight forward connections to very simple principles: touching is better than looking, mistakes are informative, and learning is always more effective when it's fun.
The best museums have tapped the wider range of ways in which we learn, including through gross motor movement, spatial analysis (my  favorite), music, social, and so on. An interesting resource is Howard Gardiner's Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons [Basic Books, 2006]. In Gardiner's model, much of the education and information world is built solely on what he labels as linguistic and logical/mathematical. He postulates that we have, to differing levels, a wider variety of ways in which to perceive, understand, manipulate and contribute to the world. Children's museums, and some libraries, utilize this concept to increase the numbers of people they can qualitatively impact as well as the extent to which the experience takes hold. Might be something to look into! |
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The Office
The office: yes, that's right, the office. There are a number of new membership-based facilities that offer short-term space use for a monthly fee. Think health club, except the treadmill is a workspace, the life guard is technical support, and the weight room is a conference room. For something around $60 per month you get to pop in, use the computer, plug in your laptop, collect mail, and use a conference space... all of the things you might need to do from time to time over the course of a month at a fraction of the cost of renting and equipping traditional office space. Depending on your needs, you can get enclosed office space, video conferencing equipment, support staff, and more. This is great for entrepreneurs and part time or self employed persons.
 In a library, it offers the same potential. Many communities have large numbers of such one-person businesses or start ups. The library can support this incubator function and help build small businesses. A number of libraries have had great success defining a new relationshi  p and broader level of support within their communities by virtue of this aid to the 'new' economy. There are hurdles, however: time limits, acoustic control, maintaining multiple functionality and avoiding competition with area businesses. Certainly not for everyone, but something that might be considered. |
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Back to the Caveats
All of these inspirations need to be kept in context. The library truly is a special place that is not an office, not a children's museum, not a store, and not a coffee shop. It has some of these attributes and many more, often related to seriousness of endeavor. As we have noted in past issues, even the teens will be on the look-out for a quiet place and may come to the library to find it.
 The big challenge with all inspirations is to keep track of what is essential: what is timeless and what is trendy. An enclosed group activity space that allows interaction and accommodates technology is timeless. It doesn't matter if the room is a creation station, a maker space, a mediascape, or a conference room. Let the room adapt to today's needs but have the room!
The other challenge is to use all your senses, including that most often overlooked sense: hearing. In our understandable desire to realize all the potential latent in social discourse and group interactions, we should remember that there is still a need for a place to "get away from it all" or to do some "serious work" and that place is also the library. If you are unclear as to the impact of ambient noise on certain uses, see Julian Treasure's TED Talk on classroom design. A classroom is also not a library, but there is a lesson here.
Take the lessons to heart but do not sell the grand vision cheap. With proper zoning, material choices and partitions, there is a way to get the variety of environments that will support users from the active noisy group to the quiet individual.
So there you have it. Even on holiday you can't get away from thinking about libraries. How great is that?
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