Road trip to Olin & the MIT Media Lab
Earlier this week, a group of our staff from the Metropolitan New York Library Council took a road trip up to Massachusetts to visit library at the Olin College of Engineering and the MIT Media Lab, two great spaces for learning, teaching, and doing. Olin and the Media Lab have different audiences and participants, and both operate within unique institutional contexts, but they share some similar programmatic challenges. Both need to support multiple modes of work, and both spaces feature architectural, furniture, and technical systems that are engineered for collaboration, reflection, stimulation, and play.
As we plan our own move to 599 11th Avenue in New York, we are all well aware that METRO is neither a library nor the MIT Media Lab. Instead, we are a member-driven collaborative of libraries, archives, and museums. The site visits helped us understand the design patterns employed in the other spaces so that we can implement our own solutions within our own context.
At Olin, Jeff Goldenson gave us a tour and told us about the remarkable transformation he has orchestrated within their library in only two years. Jeff has worked at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and is one of the instructors for the Library Test Kitchen class. He has a knack for finding elegant, simple, inexpensive solutions to service designs and an intuitive understanding of furniture-scale interventions that influence activity and culture.
After seeing a life-sized cardboard prototype for a circulation desk in action, the addition of wheels to every stationary bookshelf, and the homemade tables and materials racks and floor coverings, Jeff’s iterative, low-cost, low-stakes / high impact development pattern came into focus. Put simply: Let’s get this, then do this to it, then it will work well as that for a while.
For example, take a thing you have in your library: a bookshelf. Then you perform some kind of quick creative transformative act: you put wheels on it. The added affordance enables the object to provide a new or enhanced service: the shelf is suddenly available on demand for classes in a different room. And finally, the intervention may have a temporal vector… perhaps these are merely prototype bookshelves, with the usefulness of mobility being tested before making a significant investment in more rolling shelves.
At the Media Lab, Andrew Sliwinski gave us a tour of the many mind-boggling facilities, which I’m very sorry I couldn’t photograph :( Andrew’s experience developing Scratch, running diy.org, and working with Lego makes him legendary among youth services librarians and emerging technology specialists. From Lifelong Kindergarten to Mediated Matter, we observed the ways people worked independently and collaboratively, and the systems they had built and customized for themselves to be comfortable and efficient in their work. We learned that intentional collocation of labs with seemingly different areas of focus often yields interesting and unexpected results… a note we will certainly be taking into consideration as we develop our own lab or studio services at METRO.
While we were awestruck by the facilities, we found comfort in the imperfections as well. METRO has struggled with terrible acoustics in our current space, so we are making a priority of improved acoustics for the event area at our new home. But even at the Media Lab, there were issues with sound traveling from an active prototyping space to more solitary, focused workspaces.
METRO will leave our current offices the last week of September, and we’ll be building out our new space in October and November. During this transition, and as our organization grows and changes, we will engage our membership in the user-centered design process evident in Jeff’s work at Olin, and we’ll keep in touch with Andrew and beacons of innovation like the Media Lab for inspiration in our service design processes. METRO will be anything but silent while we move: you can expect frequent updates, and we are always happy to get input from our membership.
