Little Fox Shop

Susanne Dorson came in the LABRARY with her family.

Son pictured here:

We got to talking and she told me about the amazing shop she co-founded just down the road in Arlington called The Little Fox Children’s Resale Shop, aka The Little Fox Shop.  So Annie and I finally took a field trip.

 

 

They’ve really got an amazing thing going there, a bulleted list of things we learned.

The space:

  • + The space is attached to the Edith Fox Library in Arlington, MA.
  • + The room was never used by the library however, it previously housed the town depts., so it’s not taking up library space
  • + It’s large (stroller friendly is key they’ve learned)
  • + A Professional look and display is important to sales

It’s a symbiotic relationship, all money goes to the library.  The impact is amazing:

  • + keeps the library open on Friday, one extra day each week
  • + a new paint job for the library
  • + new blinds
  • + computer tables
  • + non-fiction kids books, among other collections purchases made by ….
  • + bean bag chairs
  • + furniture re-upholstery
  • + sing-alongs
  • + signage

Beyond bringing in money, Little Fox Shop relies entirely on volunteers for operations, a unique community building opportunity:

  • + expecting-mother volunteers meet new mothers (while also learning about the who world of baby clothes and gear)
  • + volunteer parents can bring kids along while they work
  • + senior citizens stay connected to folks of all ages, and vice versa – intergenerational

 

From the moment I heard about LFS, it’s stuck with me.  It’s such a complementary use of space with a library.  Parents come in for a lapsit or sing along, afterwards they wander into the Fox Shop where children can play with toys while they can shop or just hang out and play too.

It’s an interesting thing when libraries, or services in them, begin to sell things. Is this erosion?  Some uses of space seem less so.  A coffee shop can be a natural fit.  Children’s resale shops feel like a fit too.  Perhaps the second hand nature, the grassroots beginnings, the kid’s orientation, plus the free-to-play policy feels sufficiently gentle.  I don’t feel like the Edith Fox Branch “sold out” or something.

And for libraries faced with closure or dramatic reduction programs and hours, an entrepreneurial approach to problem-solving doesn’t hurt.

 

 

 

 


Media Wall

I love the whole relevance by adjacency logic that libraries rely on. Similar things are next to each other. But libraries only do this with books. Can’t we do it with more media types?

 

Media Wall: A gestalt, walk-by browsing experience. No headphones required.

I’ve been curious about this idea of a Media Wall for a while. A walk-along stack interlacing the “push” of motion media with the more “pull” required of print media. Then, couple weeks back, I was at a friend’s place, and he basically had the arrangement already in place (plus toy storage for his sons).

 

Here’s the professional sound dome technology:

Single Localizer Sound Dome Demonstration Video from Brown Innovations, Inc.

 

You can also imagine handing over this audio/video/shelf space infrastructure to an artist or class and see it used in unexpected ways.

 

This past weekend I went through two iterations.  I first got a rough protoype going in the basement.  I used one of the old LABRARY lamps from Ikea.

Then got a second version (using different speaker) working on a bookshelf.  Plus tried to lay down some yoga mats for acoustic dampening.

All in all, the sound domes I created worked poorly at best.  It seems brown innovations is doing more than throwing a speaker in a salad bowl.

Here’s a bit of science fiction.  I improved my sound dome’s sound localization performance in post.  It doesn’t work this well.  But further illustrates effect.

 

Next steps?


root ac·ces·si·ble space

/ro͞ot akˈsesəbəl

 

1. In computing, granting full permissions to manipulate all files or programs; superuser

 

LABRARY popped up in the heart of Harvard Square.  It didn’t take long until we realized the space was perhaps of the most valuable thing we had.


View Larger Map
People wanted to borrow it. As soon as we opened up the doors, the inquiries came in.  Folks wanted a cool space to use for their own purposes.

 

In computer system administration there are those trusted enough to be superusers.  Superusers have root access to the server, they’re trusted with the keys to make any change to any file.

 

In handing over the keys to 92 Mt. Auburn, we were promoting certain users to superusers.  They could borrow the space for their purpose outside our normal operating hours.

 

This is not a new idea. It’s the community room concept, just taken much further.

It worked especially well because we were a pop-up, disconnected with a larger library. But what if libraries were to create storefront labs, lock-off-able from the rest of the library with their own egress?

Concept sketch of a storefront, root-accessible lab


Festival Booth Pattern: The Walk Exchange

I went to IDEAS CITY on a kind of field trip.  I wanted to see the things people’ve been thinking about and wanted to see how they communicated their ideas and projects in a “festival-like” fashion.  It was also an excuse to get down the city and see friends.   I’m using booth 16, The Walk Exchange as a case study, they just did such a great job.

 

Couple things

 

1) SMILE: Welcomed with a smiling face. Always a good start.

 

2) Cool Place-setting They had a really cheap, lo-fi table describing the days activities.  They full text describing the walks that they were doing that day taped to the center of a Kraft-paper covered table.  Radiating from the center were fun, highly visual descriptions of the walks that added a whole different voice to each of the course (walk) offerings.  It just woke up the whole table.  It felt like marginalia.

 

3) Bibliography On their “About us” hand out, they had the traditional copy describing who they are, what they do, etc.  But on the reverse side, they had this wonderful “Readings on Walking” list.  It’s a bibliography.  A bookshelf.  And in going through it, I immediately felt a much, much deeper connection to The Walk Exchange because I knew where they were coming from.   Many of the texts they listed were ones that I liked or was curious about.  Describing who you are through the lens of what you’ve read is extremely efficient, no-ego, and it sets a generous, open tone.

TO DO: put bibliography on this site.

Nice you guys.  Super cool.


Learning from MIT Hobby Shop

The Hobby Shop at MIT is in its 75th year.  I was a grad student at the MIT Media Lab, which has an amazing shop with every tool I could want, but I would go to the other side of the campus to make things at the Hobby Shop. I always felt welcomed there.  And I knew I could ask any dumb question.  Never judgement, just encouragement. This culture is explained really well in the video:

“If I’m coming in as a beginner, and I don’t know how to use a mill or I don’t know how to use a lathe, but I do need to use it, then all I have to do is ask one of the senior members and say, “Hey look, can you help me with this?” …[and] no matter what we’re working on if someone else needs help, we stop and teach them how to use the machine.  Because that’s how we learned, and we want to pass on that ball.”

Folkers Rojas, President, MIT Hobby Shop Club

I think there is a lot to learn from this place in thinking about (academic) LABRARIES:

  1. Open to (nearly) all – Open to students, graduates, faculty, alumni & staff.
  2. Non-departmental – Open to all department students
  3. No power dynamic – Meet faculty, undergrads, etc.  on a very casual basis
  4. Interest – People show interest in others works
  5. Learning from each other – You don’t rely on help and advice only from the shopmaster, rather, everyone else around you is your first ask.  
  6. Not tools, culture – I didn’t care that the tools at the Hobby Shop may be older, the culture made it worth the trip.  

 

 


Balance

 


YTA Architects / Find original post here

YTA’s “Bibliotheca Digital”, or single family media room and it’s corresponding explanation — captured something that I’d been feeling.

Two excerpted comments of theirs really resonated:

“This library …created a space where high-tech contrasts with raw matter …creating dialogue and balance.”

 

“vintage elements maintain the memory of the analog…”

There are two oppositions here:

  1. honest, slow physical materiality vs. fast digital slippery-ness
  2. old (mechanical) technology  vs. new technology (black box / indistinguishable from magic)

 

It was amazing how popular these typewriters were at the LABRARY:

 


notes on hybrid space

The relationship between online and offline came up in many different forms at LABRARY. How should LABRARY or any other physical environment live both online + offline? this is what I mean by hybrid space.

Notes from the week

VOICE
How can you give a space a recognizable voice. Here’s a sketch (recorded in my office) of a dual-feed scenario with a birds-eye web cam and some color manipulation.

HD Webcams are now cheap enough ($60) that you could instrument an environment with multiple. Another tack which would give you greater image control would be to get a Canon Powershot ($160) or two, tether them so they could record directly to your hard drive, and drive their recording with the open source CHDK software.

TEXT/IMAGE INSPIRATION

Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood:

Gene Youngblood at SAIC for the effects and visuals, rather than the content.

Exploding Plastic Inevitable – The Factory Andy Warhol

INTERFACE

The idea here is two concurrent “streams”, one capturing the current scene (or recent past), the other documenting an online discussion. Each moves through time at its own pace.

On the discussion board at right, the goal would be to blur the feel of a blog, discussion board, and mailing list. Very often there’s an implicit heirarchy, blogs are where the less frequent, authoritative posts are made by a limited population. Discussion boards are filled with back and forths between community members and visitors. Optimally it would read as a blog anybody could write to.


2013

It’s been a little tough reaclimating since LABRARY / Library Test Kitchen Fall 2012. A lot of energy was put into that endeavor by a lot of people. I threw together a draft video of the LABRARY experience for those that weren’t able to come by:

LABRARY – Draft - from Harvard Library Innovation Lab on Vimeo.

We’re not running this class this Spring, but we’re still meeting as a staff. Work will still be moving forward, first steps will reflecting on lessons learned and bringing the student work to the forefront of the website so stay tuned.

In the meantime:

http://librarytestkitchen.org/talks/cooper/outtakes.html

I visited a class at Cooper Union yesterday. These are the outtakes which contain some of the things we’ve been thinking about/looking at lately (in the form of a website/slide show using Deck.JS built by one of LiL‘s collaborators, Caleb Troughton). The maps project is the original stackview, something I did a while ago, the library radio station project, www.thelibrary.fm, is a collaboration with Matt Phillips from LiL)