The findings of the ethnographic phase and interactions with students resulted in a set of contemporary behaviours that impact the design of the library. The next stage of the project set out to research through design, ready to test and fail and try again. I honed a set of design questions that draw from the historical, contextual and ethnographic research to set out a challenge that could be tackled through design. The key and overiding question is ‘How can study space in the university library be designed to support contemporary multi-programme use?’ This central question is broken down into three subquestions: ‘How can interior design help balance the tensions between focussed individual work and the social collaboration involved in peer-to-peer learning?’; ‘How can we design flexibly, facilitating layouts for reader space and relating the individual study module to the overall architecture?’;
‘How can services - data, light, power and acoustics - be integrated to create an individually adaptable microspace that balances functional requirements with aesthetic appeal?’
some excellent examples of study spaces, particularly for group work. New off-the-shelf solutions currently being offered by manufacturers tackle power integration and the need for acoustic absorpBefore launching into design to re- tion. spond to the questions above, lets consider how current academic However these pieces tend to be library furniture responds to the space-inefficient and inflexible as questions. The images below show they are often derived from office-, examples of typical library fur- rather than library-, specific precniture that have been installed in edents. In an office setting, based the last twenty years or so and are on British Council of Offices still in place and used today. These analysis, a density per person of 6 more traditional solutions don’t – 10 m2 is the norm for open plan meet current design criteria: they space, whilst for university librarstruggle to integrate new technol- ies a briefed density of 3m2 per ogies and have a lack of consider- person is typical (based on recent ation of what the overall space will briefs for Universities of Kent, look like. Manchester and Portsmouth. This limits the number of large pieces Crucially, however, this simple, that can be used whilst maintainmass market furniture, is afforda- ing density. ble and it is what as a designer, user client or specifier you may Another key issue to consider is find that furniture budgets are still the price point with pieces such as based on. these being difficult to justify with constrained funding. In more recent years as so many universities have expanded and Architects have designed bespoke renewed their libraries we can see solutions which can be effec-
tive. Examples are shown on the spread overleaf including interesting pieces designed by architects Hawkins Brown from Coventry University where the use of bespoke joinery creates characters in the space, balancing individual and group work. At University of the Arts, London architects Stanton Williams have designed a system of flexible seating that enables different layouts for group work and houses integrated power. Bespoke examples such as these can however, suffer from high costs, low levels of R&D which can lead to a heaviness/clunkiness in design, and a lack of scalability as each piece is project specific. Overall, we can see that a very different library interior is emerging to meet needs that have developed over time. The challenge of how to design this new library interior for current needs and future change set out the goal for the next phase of the research.
v London Metropolitan University Library Quiet Study Area, 2013
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^ University of Manchester Library, Quiet Study Area, 2014
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