A Temporary Library

This week, our group met on October 17 in Eindhoven to flesh out the concept further. We wanted to test our ideas about interpersonal communication, expertise, and learning in reality to see the potential problems or opportunities in this method of research.

We split up into two groups to see how we could capture individual expertise on film. After interviewing a design student, a bookstore owner, a fashion boutique manager, a wine saleswoman, and a battery salesman, we quickly realized some qualifying aspects of the video format. A focus on the person’s face was critical in order to engage the viewer, and editing would be required to present the offered knowledge in its most concentrated form. Most importantly, however, the workshop revealed that framing the question was the most significant determinant of the way the person expressed themselves on camera.

In our subjects, we continually encountered a self-perception that they were not experts. Although we debated their objectivity, we quickly realized that there was a strong causal relationship between the self-view and the demeanor of the expression. Someone may be well-versed in a subject, but there is quite a big difference between familiarity and passion.

Chris and Wieki brought up the paradigm of Achterwerk in de kast, a children’s television program in which a child would open a curtain before the camera, talk about a favorite topic for a few minutes, and then close the camera again. The clip on eels (“palings”) above is a classic example from this show. On seeing this model of presentation, we were impressed by the intimacy of the setting and the forthcoming nature about the way the subjects spoke.

After this discussion, we had a further workshop to sketch out ideas about the way we envisioned the system and the space. We will update soon with the next stage!

On October 13, we met Chris and Wiekie in Maastricht and shared our experiences from our library visit during the first week. We quickly discovered that our challenge would be to question the nature of or even the very need for the contemporary library, and materialize our doubts, interests, and visions of the future in a physical space.

We began the morning by discussing formative experiences we each had in libraries. These experiences shared elements of the sublime, the awe induced by traditional libraries and the weight of their embodied knowledge, but also of the banal, the library as pragmatic part of everyday life. We talked about precedents in library design, such as the library in the University of Utrecht by Wiel Arets, which has an entirely black interior with white tables for concentration of focus, or the Bibliothèque nationale de France by Dominique Perrault, in which four towers encircle a large park, giving the visitor the feeling of being “in the trees.”

Later, we visited the site for the first time. The interior itself is quite generic and thus a “blank slate” - it can be adapted to fit many different visions. The exterior looks over a canal across from the Timmerfabriek of the old Sphinx factory, close to many of the other sites for the Great Indoors Education Programme.

The afternoon was spent in a creative workshop, where we individually sketched out different ideas and proposals for the new library. We had many different ideas involving lighting, silence and sound, questioning the book itself, the linkages between books, the notions of work and play, among others. We all became attracted to one idea involving people and expertise, which we will develop over the next two weeks before final realization.