Today I saw one pos­si­ble future for libraries, and it has me pretty excited. I can look back on my pro­fes­sional career and see a pro­gres­sion of advo­cat­ing for shift­ing ser­vices to where our users are, mak­ing our spaces more col­lab­o­ra­tive, and rein­vig­o­rat­ing libraries as the com­mu­nity cen­ter (regard­less of type of library). It’s why I’ve explored tech­nol­ogy, blog­ging, RSS, social net­works, gam­ing, and col­lab­o­ra­tive spaces. Today, many of those pieces came together for me in a pretty amaz­ing pack­age that has the power to reimag­ine the library as third place, cross some dig­i­tal divides, and inte­grate par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture into our ser­vice model. Even bet­ter, it involves peo­ple and books, not just technology.

So what did I see today? A project called Thinker­ing Spaces, con­ceived of by some very smart peo­ple at the Illi­nois Insti­tute of Technology’s Insti­tute of Design and funded by the MacArthur Foun­da­tion. After quite a bit of ini­tial vision­ing and research, this group has built a pro­to­type for a rel­a­tively cheap, portable, col­lab­o­ra­tive space that can be put up and taken down in libraries of any size on the fly. It’s built using an out-of-the-catalog Steel­case frame, and uses Johnny Chung Lee’s Nintedo wiimote hacks to cre­ate an inex­pen­sive, drag-and-drop envi­ron­ment. The tech­nol­ogy is as plug and play as it can be to cre­ate an open source, open con­tent space where any future tech­nol­ogy that is built on these stan­dards can be eas­ily integrated.

The point is to bring spaces into libraries that let peo­ple col­lab­o­rate around the con­tent that already exists in in our build­ings, add new con­tent to the mix, mash it all up to cre­ate some­thing new, and share it with the com­mu­nity. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a way to con­nect peo­ple with the phys­i­cal world and help them make sense of it by inter­act­ing with and chang­ing it. It’s another instance where the library adds value to the equa­tion (the same way it does with books and now games), offer­ing an expe­ri­ence you can’t repli­cate at home, borne of the com­mu­nity. TJ, the pro­gram­ming wiz­ard behind the cur­tain, called it a “human inter­face envi­ron­ment,” rather than a “human com­puter inter­ac­tion.” It takes the focus off tech­nol­ogy and puts it back onto the people.

The var­i­ous pieces are designed for dif­fer­ent types of inter­ac­tions, including:

• asynchronous
• synchronous
• sub­scribe to a men­tor (one-to-many)
• col­lab­o­ra­tive storytelling/joint commentary
• cumu­la­tive expe­ri­ence (see what oth­ers have done and build on it or change it)

Because the space is scal­able down to 5’x5’ or expand­able up to 12’x12’, it should fit in most build­ings in some form. Libraries could assem­ble the full ver­sion one day and only cer­tain pieces the next week. It could be used at spe­cific times for cer­tain pro­gram­ming and then bro­ken down and stored until the next ses­sion. It has its own con­tained wire­less net­work, or it could access the library’s wifi. It’s designed to cre­ate a dis­tinct, exploratory envi­ron­ment that doesn’t require any­one to run it.

Out of all of the dis­cus­sions and demon­stra­tions today, TJ summed it up best when he said the project is about ” ‘look at what I did,’ as opposed to ‘look at what I bought.’ ” To pro­vide that type of inter­ac­tion in the safe, non-commercialized third place of the library for the entire com­mu­nity is a pretty excit­ing prospect. No other entity in the com­mu­nity could pro­vide the breadth and depth of this type of expe­ri­ence. The team at IIT — Dale Fahn­strom, Greg Pry­grocki, Heloisa Moura, and TJ McLeish — has cre­ated a work­ing pro­to­type that daz­zles the imag­i­na­tion for the next gen­er­a­tion of library services.

Over the next few days, I’ll write more about the details, the plan, and what I hope is the future of the project, but for now you can see my Flickr set of pic­tures from today’s visit to get an idea of what it looks like and what it can do. Keep­ing in mind that it’s still in the pro­to­type phase, it’s still pretty inspiring.

See also:

• Mash­ing Up Con­tent in the Library (Thinker­ing Spaces II)
• Imple­ment­ing the Pro­to­type (Thinker­ing Spaces III)