Last week, along with a remarkable group of partners, I submitted a Beta Sprint proposal for an architectural interface for a Digital Public Library of America.  I’m really proud of this work and I believe it could have a substantial impact on public libraries and other memory institutions like museums and archives.  The design concept was realized by the team at Noll & Tam Architects and Planners, including Chris Noll, Jason Barish, and Abraham Jayson as well as Matthew Williams Design, myself, and considerable conceptual development from Sam Klein and Katie Filbert of the Wikimedia Foundation and the DC Wiki Society.

The Library Lab, or ‘LibLab’, is a system of 11 modules, each of which is a scalable interface for creating and contributing a particular type of knowledge, and all of which are interoperable with one another.  Libraries do a great job of making books and other media available and accessible for their users, but they don’t do as good or consistent a job focusing their users on creating and contributing content.  Probably the best example of consistent content creation in public libraries is children’s craft programs, and even with these the results and products of the programs are rarely published to the web or shared widely.  Quite a few libraries have found corners in which to build public media labs, while others have more robust efforts underway to build information commons that include content creation in their program, and certainly the excellent YouMedia curriculum serves as a guide for the creation of teen and youth content creation spaces across the country.  Still, the big design problem that public libraries face remains in play: our audience is *everyone*, so we must design for *everyone*.  Focusing solely on content creation as a youth activity in libraries, museums, and archives is insufficient.  Our intention with the modular Library Lab system is to create a flexible framework that can be adapted, extended, and configured to support content creation in any public space for any audience.

The modules you see are built with a flexible system of components that can be designed digitally, transmitted to any location, and fabricated using simple tools and methodologies.  The size of the forms allows them to be fabricated from readily available standard materials such as plywood, MDF, plastics, metal, or composite materials as well as different colors or finishes.  All of the design and fabrication techniques are easily adaptable to individual needs, and the processes are also open source and part of the creative commons.  You don’t like something about the existing Library Lab plans, or want to tweak something for your use case?  No problem, this system invites versioning, customization and experimentation.

The Wiki Society of Washington DC is running the very first demonstration Library Lab at the Martin Luther King Jr. DC Public Library from September until the end of December.  This lab calls itself a “hackspace for knowledge”, inviting people to the space to collaborate on projects, run workshops, and involve students.  In the DC LibLab, you won’t yet find fully realized versions of the module designs described here, but you will find implementations of the activities the modules support.  Over the course of the months that the DC LibLab is operating, we’ll be doing hands-on work gathering data and testing the principles as described in the design concept.  This data will provide a feedback loop that informs the design iterations and provides hooks for individuals and institutions to extend and customize the modules and their components for their own use cases.  Please, visit the DC LibLab, volunteer, and participate in these formative moments!  We also invite your commentary on the Library Lab concept in general; librarylab.org will feature forums and opportunities for user feedback very soon.

Librarians will be interested in is his work developing assisted technologies based on inclusive game design.  Many public libraries offer assisitive technologies, and Pitaru’s work may really push what libraries can offer in a new direction. His work will be published in a forthcoming MIT Press book called The Ecology of Games, and I found another little piece on the MIT Press site that is rather interesting.

“In this chapter I examine the accessibility of today’s games, or rather the lack of. Even common medical conditions such as arthritis, repetitive stress injuries, and diminished vision may prevent individuals from playing today’s top software titles, not to speak of the barriers that these titles pose to the blind, deaf, and immobile. The clearest and most disheartening manifestation can be found when examining the special-needs sector. There we find children who cannot partake in their most coveted play activities, due to inconsiderate (and therefore inflexible) game design. I chose this sector to both define the problem and explore its solutions. Written from the perspective of a designer, the chapter first describes the lack-of-play and its residual impact as perceived in a school that caters to over 200 children with special needs. In an attempt to create the “ultimate-accessible” game, I demonstrate how games can be designed to be intrinsically accessible while retaining their original playability. Lastly, I show how normalization-of-play may improve upon the social, educational, and therapeutic aspects of the children’s daily lives. Tying this fringe-case with the grander ecology of games, I discusses how better accessibility may encourage more people to enjoy games—be they gamers, students, or patients.”

Also, for fun, have a look at this amazing video from a live performance where Pitaru used dancers and animation together.  Unfortunately the youtube video isn’t great quality, but on a big screen at the lecture it was particularly incredible.

After strategic planning BootCamp last week, I’ve had Nelson and Garcia’s 18 service responses on my mind non-stop.  It’s a significant step to drill down the services we can offer at public libraries to 18 clear bullet points.  My last post on this blog offered a few anecdotes advocating for simplicity in the communication arts.  Having 18 concise service responses for public libraries to choose from is a great starting point as we strive for simplicity.  The next piece of Nelson and Garcia’s process requires that a library creating a strategic plan pick only a few of these 18 responses as priorities.  My assessment of the current climate is that public libraries have had a really hard time spelling out their mission and vision in the digital age, and that is one of the reasons we have wishy-washy statements of purpose.  A little while back Wendy Lukehart of the DCPL wrote a great piece about “Mission Envy” on the Urban Library Council’s Foresight 2020 discussion board.  I republished it here a while back on my old personal blog and it’s a really nice piece.  Read it, and consider how you might clarify your library’s mission.

Still, I keep coming back to my favorite service response offered in the 18.  It is a rather new service response, one that likely does not land high in the priorities at my library.  I suspect that at this point it is not the highest priority at many public libraries at all, but its one that I am interested in and hope to see more libraries embrace in the near future.  Without further ado, it is:

Express Creativity: Create and Share Content

Residents will have the services and support they need to express themselves by creating original print, video, audio, or visual content in a real-world or online environment.

It is easy enough to imagine tackling this priority at your library with physical-world activities.  You probably already do so via arts and crafts programs, poetry slams, or any collaborative activity that results in a finished product like a mural or an exquisite corpse drawing or a work of fiction.  It’s a little harder to figure out how that creative process can be facilitated by a library in virtual or networked setting.   I’m aware of two tools/projects that become activities supporting this initiative, no doubt there are more. I thought I’d share the two I’ve been looking at and invite people to post similar projects.   As I find new things I’ll do my best to keep posting them to this blog as well.

1) Available at Cleveland Public Library, and perhaps at other libraries: Scratch.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

2) Currently in development at IIT Institute of Design: ThinkeringSpace.

ThinkeringSpace is a system, made of both physical and virtual environments, that aims to promote creative and critical thinking skills for the 21st century. Celebrating the book, it presents opportunities for doing things together, sharing ideas and authoring in new ways. Focused on school-aged children in libraries, the project is part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Hello PLA folks,

I’ve been avidly reading the discussion of strategic planning from the Results BootCamp and hope the blogosphere can help me with a design/service problem. I’ve attached photos of the circulation/reference desk in our children’s room. My opinion- It takes up a HUGE amount of floor space and I can’t see the children over it and it is not moveble or adaptable at all. Not to mention the sharp marble corners at the precise height of an average nine year old’s eye. However, by my uneducated guess it probably cost at least $15,000 to custom build in the midnineties. And as my teenage page put it “You can’t change it! It’s the reference desk! It’s perfect! It’s been here my whole life!”