Explore is a collection of 4 research prototypes of public displays of libraries I designed, developed, and evaluated during my PhD thesis. Their goal is to allow a more interactive and meaningful display of events organised by public libraries.

All the prototypes were designed during participatory design workshops I lead involving professional librarians, over a dozen of sessions. Each prototype of public display aims to answer an use case specific to a given place, a given time, and the nearby library collections.

Some of the participatory activities that I organized: collaborative sketching, situated enactment, storytelling, participatory mapping, etc.

I developed the prototypes as Single-Page Applications with a specific care regarding offline capabilities as the network in the libraries was quite unreliable.

Tools

VueJS

Firebase

CouchDB

The prototypes were tested and evaluated in 3 libraries in 3 european countries: France, Denmark, and Sweden over several month in field conditions. From the observation and interviews we conducted we were able to learn a lot about opportunities offered by public displays in libraries and how they relate to space, collections, and the social life around them.

Are you interested in the scientific outcomes of the research projet this was part of ? Have a look here ⬇️ You'll find our most important results written in a digestible way.