Future Libraries Lab

The transformative changes enabled by digital technologies have been affecting society at large, with a profound impact on the relationship between people and information. This change requires libraries to rethink their role of curators and keepers of knowledge, and of facilitators of education and dialogue.

What role can innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence play in enabling, facilitating, and mediating access to knowledge? How can the design of library processes and programs be changed to accommodate the knowledge needs of a digital and diverse society?

The Future Libraries Lab is a Delft Design Lab that takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining knowledge and expertise in design, computer science, and digital libraries. The lab facilitates the interaction between students, researchers, and practitioners to foster the development of research and innovation activities that have the ambition to imagine and shape the future of libraries. To achieve this goal, and in collaboration with our partners, the Future Libraries Lab pursues a renewed research agenda organized into three main themes: New Interactions, Citizenship in a Digital Society and Lifelong Learning.

How will future patrons regard and interact with their libraries? Will they view them as collections of items, things that they can view or borrow? Or will the library become something else?

More digital technologies are mediating our experiences with libraries, and we can anticipate even further entanglements in the near future. Yet we still speak with reference to traditional physical libraries: with e-book services, we think in terms of bookshelves and lending periods, we grasp for keywords to label or summarize books. These analogies of physical media have eased our transition to digital services, but they are now becoming restrictive, and we find ourselves in need of new metaphors to envision and work with information in digital forms. To harness the capacities of the Digital we need new frames of reference beyond extrapolation of what was before. Will future reading rooms look like offices with monitors? Or will they more resemble “A Day Made of Glass”? Will users pick up VR goggles like the Apple Vision Pro and walk through an augmented library? What does it really mean to make a library computational? And in addition to reading and having access to information, what other types of usage will the future library inspire? Will the future library be a place for creation, for (climate) action, for helping each other? How will the role of the library as a public space develop?

New types of usage might affect libraries deeply and will require more than just a fresh interface. Asking users about improvement for existing services remains constructive but is only a part of the picture. For a future vision, we need an interdisciplinary creative playground in which to experiment. From these experiments, we need to find ways to realize what they represent and codify them as infrastructure. Infrastructural changes develop only over time; libraries need a roadmap for them.

Under this theme, many projects can be imagined. For example:

• How will users in the future search for information? Will they search for items (books)? Or will they look for content pieces that can come from many sources and are interconnected by certain aspects? Might someone ask: ‘Build me a collection of snippets about a certain topic, which I can review and use for further exploration’?
• How will users get inspiration? How can they navigate to spaces which surprise them? Is there a way to otherwise create the serendipity of walking past shelves and picking up things that attract attention?
• How can AI tools help to generate overviews through distant reading, summarization and translation?
• How can spatial computing present information beyond static 2D-screens and open the way to immersive experiences?
• How can we present textual content with layers for annotations, translations or even audio, such that these materials become a starting point for collaboration instead of an endpoint for consumption?
• How do we think society will develop, and which services and types of usage should libraries develop to cater for the needs of the future society?

In a society of fast digital development, (mis)information overload, and overwhelming transitions, it is challenging to keep up with ourselves, meaningfully belong to communities, and critically reflect on and participate in addressing societal challenges.

This research theme aims to identify ways libraries can strengthen the links between individuals, communities and society. How can libraries stimulate diverse engagement, e.g. data collection and donation, collaborative sense-making, reflection and creation, and provide infrastructures that encourage individuals to promote engagement and help others? We can think of libraries as places where communities flourish and coexist as a vehicle for individuals to belong and actively participate in addressing societal challenges. We can also picture places for individuals to create and experiment with alternative versions of themselves and their environments while being encouraged to collaborate with the data they collect, their lived experiences, and their opinions to reflect and construct futures together.

Libraries have long stood as spaces for self-reflection and growth. In a time where limitless information can be drawn into the palm of one’s hand, the library has a role to play in helping people gain agency of this information and use it to beneficial ends. Here we consider how people want or need to inform themselves to meet short- and long-term goals. We might also think now of a new species of libraries, one where visitors make use of their space but also imprint something of themselves. They could become library bearers (cf. the HLO’s ‘Unjudge Someone’) with vast stores of details about their own lives, ambitions and interests accumulated and used by them in different ways over long periods of time.

The goal of this research theme is two-fold: In the first instance we want to discover new ways in which libraries and their holdings can spark and foster curiosity about the world. As an extension of this, we want to design systems, processes and activities which embed instances of curiosity into individuals’ constantly evolving worldview.

In their recent forecast for libraries in the future, Lidewij Edelkoort and Charlotte Grun conjecture that Lifelong Development (learning and more) will be increasingly important among the public, and libraries will have a prominent role in facilitating this development. In ‘The Age of the Amateur’ they project a significant loss of white collar jobs due to AI and other technologies, an upcoming era where people will have to find a different meaning in life with less value in formal education for the purpose of careers. The need to express oneself as an individual and to share stories will remain, they anticipate, so learning to play music, act, write poetry, do maths or play chess in safe public spaces will be increasingly valued. Meanwhile libraries will collaborate with other societal partners whose resources will blend to facilitate this the best way they can. Distinctions between libraries, theaters, museums, cinemas as separate institutions will fade to give rise to new cultural spaces such as the ‘Kulturhus’ (cf.https://www.kulturhusdenekamp.nl/, CODA Apeldoorn – museum, bibliotheek, archief en ExperienceLab (coda-apeldoorn.nl)).

How probable are these visions of future personal growth? Should we be working toward them? Away? Here we want the ideals and the realities that test them.

As members and partners of the lab change, so too do our research interests evolve over time. Below is a small archive of challenges explored by colleagues since the inception of the lab in 2021.

How can future libraries facilitate more serendipitous and adventurous exploration of physical and digital collections?

Modern libraries are transforming and complementing their physical print collections to digital collections. While this allows for efficient access based on a user’s specific information need, the current format of providing digital collections does not allow for easy exploration and serendipitous discovery. Physical collections still allowed to browse the shelves of a well-organized library to discover new and exciting content, but the exploration of digital library spaces is currently hindered by current access and discovery interfaces.

The goal of this research theme is to investigate how end-users could access and explore digital and physical collections with new, innovative, and playful exploration and discovery activities.

How can future libraries better serve the needs of their users, and of society at large?

The role that libraries are playing in society is changing. While technical progress allows them to expand their collections, it is often difficult for libraries to accommodate the needs of all their users, and to extend their audience beyond the predominant socio-economic groups. Libraries are transforming from places to borrow books, to public spaces for education and civic participation. The digitalization of knowledge allows new and personalized forms of content delivery (e.g. audiobooks, podcasts) and interaction (e.g., conversational agents, virtual reality), and it enables new approaches and tools for education, professionalization, and community building and engagement.

The goal of this research theme is to better understand the desires and needs of relevant public libraries’ users and to design engaging interactions and experiences for knowledge and skills development.

How can future libraries support and facilitate a just and inclusive society?

Our society is becoming increasingly diverse. Worrying trends such as marginalization, ideological polarisation, and an increasing wealth gap face the potential to profoundly disrupt public engagement, civil discourse, and, ultimately, our collective well-being. Libraries could play a transformative societal role, by embracing and promoting principles of inclusion in their collections, personnel, targeted audience, programs, and policies.

The goal of this research theme is to investigate what indicators of diversity are relevant for future libraries, and how such indicators could be used to design activities and experiences in libraries that are inclusive. With this, we seek to raise awareness on issues of diversity and inclusion in library contexts, and design novel physical and digital information access mechanisms that explicitly take these aspects into account.

a) How do library buildings change in order to serve an increasingly pro-active, digitalized community?

The collective relevance of the library today is difficult to grasp as it hardly escapes personal imagery and nostalgic rhetoric. The present public library is instead a multifaceted institution offering a multiplicity of new services and media access to all; a powerful and vital pro-active environment for grassroots autodidactic self-realization; a public space and public place of urban sense counter-fighting the erosion of digitally-led public sociality. From place of information-consumption, the public library is rapidly evolving towards a place for information-production. Consequently, identity, programming and architectural characters of public libraries are in need of critical re-envisioning.

What new architectural forms, types, relationships, urban and public roles can be associated to the changing condition of the public library?

b) How can the raising ‘making culture’ be accommodated in library buildings?

More and more libraries worldwide are offering performative spaces to support users’ creativity and to contribute to spread 21^st century skills and digital literacy. These spaces are different kinds of workshops, ateliers, labs and makerspaces facilitating making and doing, both in self-directed or assisted by tutors. Making can refer to physical and digital fabrication, coding, robotics, music, arts and so on. Making is rapidly evolving towards becoming a leading culture in contemporary society, pushed by the booming of dedicated apps and supported by rampant social and economic processes, like empowerment, broad cultural participation, prosumerism, entrepreneurism, knowledge economy.

What spatial and programmatic features of makerspaces are relevant in the context of the public library, and how to design these spaces taking into account both the future of making and the future of the library institution?