A Few Things I’ve Learned About Learning

On the streets of New York City.

My wife, Leslie, and I run the Uni Project, a nonprofit that we created to bring learning opportunities to the streets of New York City. We use custom-designed installations to pop up in parks, plazas, and other public spaces to offer reading, drawing, and hands-on experiences. The idea is to let New Yorkers embrace the act of learning, build community, and make education a visible, enjoyable part of urban life. It’s a line of work, but also, frankly, an obsession.

Over the past four years, we’ve created outdoor reading rooms on nearly 300 days in 51 neighborhoods and in all five boroughs. Along the way, we’ve observed a few things about New Yorkers, public space, and learning. We are not formally trained educators — most of what we’ve picked up has been on the street. Here’s a bit of it:

New Yorkers like to do things together, but don’t push your luck.

Public space in New York can be more of a river than a pond. New Yorkers flow through it efficiently, urgently, without acknowledging each other. Places to go! The idea of the Uni is pretty simple: Give New Yorkers from all walks of life a chance to gather around something meaningful and beautiful, and they will pause, linger, open up a bit, and even love it. It turns out that simple educational opportunities — a chance to engage in the act of learning — work like magic. Put an elegant little reading room on the street, and it brings out the best in New Yorkers and neighborhoods. Like a beaver dam, water still passes by, but you create a little pond.

However, once you get New Yorkers together, just be sure to leave them alone.

We’ve designed the Uni to be a self-guided experience that lets urban people come and go as they please. Attractive books on a shelf. Drawing boards and high-quality art materials. It should feel like you’ve wandered into a home library or an artist’s studio. We avoid lots of scheduled programs, detailed instructions, and prescribed interactions. We ask our staff to hang back and step in only if people need help. New Yorkers seem happy reading, drawing, and hanging out together. Do not mess with that.

Don’t panic. They will come.

I used to be anxious when we landed on the street with the Uni. Will people stop and read, or will they just keep streaming by? What have Leslie and I gotten ourselves into? I feel like the guy dressed as the Statue of Liberty trying to wave you inside to do your income taxes. This is embarrassing.

But it doesn’t take long for this installation…

to become this…

The Uni is like a watering hole in the desert. Offer something scarce, valuable, and beautiful, and people will find you — in fact, they will join you. I think there’s a longing out there to reconnect with real books, good pencils, nice paper, wooden puzzles, analog experiences, noncommercial experiences. When you manage the Uni, your problem is not how you’ll attract people but how you’ll send them on their way. We now schedule twice as much time for striking the Uni as setting up so we can disengage people politely. They don’t always want to go home.

Make an attraction out of learning.

Simple acts of learning are a powerful draw, but we also dress things up a little in New York. Here’s a photo of the first Uni reading room structure, funded on Kickstarter in 2011:

When we launched the Uni four years ago, we asked our friends Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon, from Höweler and Yoon Architecture, to help us create an attention-grabbing eight-foot cube that would hold everything we needed to make an outdoor pop-up library. They never flinched and went all-in. It was a hit.

Here’s how to set up the Uni tower:

I love that first Uni design, but we were soon receiving requests almost weekly, and my back was killing me. There had to be an easier way to make an attraction out of learning.

Turns out, part of the answer had been staring me in the face — for more than 25 years. When not working on the Uni, I’m in a band called The Magnetic Fields. I play the cello. Here’s a picture of me backstage.

See those stage cases behind me? There’s a case for everything on the road, from cellos to audio gear to extra eyeglasses. Why not a pop-up library in a stage case? In 2013, Eric and Meejin heard the cry of my aching back and designed the now-patented Uni reading room cart, a stage case that rolls into place and unfolds into an attractive, two-sided sculptural shelf.

We can set up in 10 minutes in almost any type of location. For example, under the 7 train in Queens:

This year, we’ll have five carts operating in New York City, including new ones dedicated to programs beyond books, like drawing and math puzzles. My back feels great.

Draw people in, gently.

These three photos capture the way we want people — especially kids — to find the Uni on their street:

A boy chases an errant basketball that rolled toward the Uni, and he pauses to look at a woman drawing. He sits down next to her. (Our benches are custom designed and seat two people.) After watching for a bit, he grabs a board and starts drawing. Leslie says that he then stayed at the Uni for a full hour, drawing and reading books about the Titanic, talking with our staff. When we had to close up, he asked Leslie to add his drawings to our communal portfolio and also took one home.

From start to finish, no one told him what to do. He came to it all on his own, and that’s exactly how we want him to remember the experience of learning at the Uni — one of discovery, agency, and happiness.

By the way, the woman in the photographs is Susan Coyne, one of our artists-in-residence, whose sole job was to sit and draw at the Uni. And let the game come to her.