Recently Francine Houben of Mecanoo Architecten talked about their design of Birmingham’s future library as a “living room for the city”. More than just storage, a dynamic space for movement, openness and exchange. In a blog she calls libraries “the cathedrals of our millennia”, which seemed a useful precursor to last Saturday’s National Libraries Day

The future of the library is, in some ways, a paradox.The trends that are running against it are more obvious, especially when combined with the financial pressures facing the British libraries system. But there are a surpring number of trends running in its favour. When you look at them together, the library becomes an object which allows us to have a discussion about the notion of the ‘public’ in the digital age.

A building? With books in it?

The long term trends which are running against the library make it easy to assume, at first sight, that the institution is an anachronism of the 19th and 20th centuries. Such trends include the rise of digital technologies, and the accompanying rise of audio-visual culture; the long wave of individualism since the late 1960s; the shift from public provision to personal provision; the pressures on public expenditure; the emergence of the e-book and the digitisation of books generally. A building? With books in it? It seems only a matter of time before the library withers away.

But look again, and some other, emerging, trends come into focus. Rising oil prices and greater work flexibility increase the value of the local; the rise of digital rights management fuels campaigns around openness; the number of books published every year continues to rise; issues of access and equity – and affordability – come into sharper focus as one austere year rolls into another; the relationship between the tangible and the digital object becomes increasingly complex; new attitudes to ownership (using, not having) make the library appear as a pioneer.

Re-inventing the library

Look again, and you can start to think that if libraries did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. But what sort of library would we invent?

For some, the building remains essential: engagement with the library is a ticket to – and a membership card for – a local community.

Some say the building needs to be there, not as “a warehouse of dead books“, but as a place to invent yourself, individually and socially.

For some it is a place of memory – and of memory yet to come, a place of inter-generational commitment, a place of conversation and convocation.

Others focus on its place in the digital world, where the library – founded on the principle of open knowledge – acts as a bulwark against the digital enclosure they see by media and technology companies.

Some see the wealth of digital data that a library holds as a resource waiting to be released, and reconnected, in the way that travel information and data has opened up a once closed world.

Others have a simpler view; as inequality rises, the library has a traditional role to play, of providing access to all who need it. The symbolism of the library at Zucotti Park and its destruction by New York’s city authorities remain powerful.

Some of these future libraries would complement each other. Some seem to have a common core. Some suggest a fundamentally different model of provision and engagement.

Then there are all the users and non-users of the future: the X-box and BBM generation, students, parents, tomorrow’s refugees and immigrants, businesses (so often left out of library planning), the hackers, nomads, chatterers of our children’s children’s generation.

Libraries as conversations

I have written elsewhere about the idea that one of the functions of futures work is to create ‘boundary objects‘, a term devised by the anthropologist Susan Leigh Star. A boundary object enables an opportunity for people from different domains and disciplines to have a shared conversation.  What’s striking to me about the list above is that the future library provides this boundary object, but not just for conversations about libraries. It opens uo a much wider conversation, about the nature of the ‘public’, of shared use, and of public space in a digital age.

The purpose of looking at the future, as the French futures pioneer Gaston Berger said, is to disturb the present. So let’s deconstruct the word library for the future so we can understand it differently today. Library is:

warmth,

safety,

books,

community,

cooperation,

advice,

support,

retreat,

shared,

memory,

meaning,

belonging,

public,

provocation,

enquiry,

access,

signpost.

And so on….

And these words create a different space for the current conversation about the library, in which it becomes meaningful part of the next Britain, as well as a part of the last one.

A longer version of this post, together with some further resources, is on the Sparknow blog. The picture of Charing Cross library is by Victoria Ward, and is posted here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

The Ebbsfleet story goes like this. A former football journalist, Will Brooks, set up a website with the intention of raising enough money to buy a club. 20,000 fans had contributed £35 each (membership has since raced to 50,000), and they reached a deal with Ebbsfleet. The plan is that “every MyFootballClub member will have an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club. Members will own the club through their MyFootballClub Trust, and together they will attempt to guide their football club to success.” The club had approahced the website, and was chosen after a vote of members – for its potential as much as anything else.

Obviously this is a shot in the dark: can an online fans network make collective decisions about tactics and players which are better than the traditional hierarchical approach? The club’s existing supporters are reported as being apprehensive – although football fans can’t be worse owners than many of the shysters who have taken control of smaller teams in the past, attracted by the opportunity to asset strip the ground. So trend 1 is about an experiment about the notion of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ – the evolving theory, recently the subject of a popular book, that groups – if asked the right question – can make better decisions that individuals. Liam Daish, the current manager, will stay as head coach and be a link between team and the MyFootballClub Trust – perhaps attracted by the prospect of significant potential investment in players. Gates and publicity are also likely to benefit.

Trend 2 is – obviously – about the ability of the internet to search out people with a common interest even if they are geographically spread, and to animate them. On this reading, MyFootballClub is similar to pledgebank, on which site people make a commitment which they’re willing to carry out as long as a specified number of other people also sign up to do the same thing. And it’s also worth noting that when Wimbledon Football Club was re-located in 2002 by its owner from south London to Milton Keynes, the internet was influential in letting its abandoned fans set up and finance their own club, AFC Wimbledon, which has so far climbed to the 7th tier of the League.

The third trend is possibly the most interesting. The top of the game has become absurdly rich in the last fifteen years as a result of Sky’s pay television deals and the revenues from the Champions League. But much of the rest of the game has suffered. Supporters Direct, which was set up (with some government funding) as a mutual organisation in 2000, has promoted the interests of supporters in clubs in the rest of the leagues, helping to develop Supporters’ Trusts at more than 100 clubs across the UK. 59 of these have an equity stake in their clubs, 38 have board representation, and 8 (2 League clubs: Chesterfield and Lincoln) are owned by Trusts. Trusts have been instrumental in saving more than a dozen clubs from closure. There is academic research on their social impact.

And tracing this back a little further, the Supporters Direct movement came out of the grassroots supporters movements of the 80s, at a time when club owners seemed clueless and disconnected. The Football Supporters Association was set up in 1985 after the Heysel Stadium disaster, and national fanzines such as When Saturday Comes and Off the Ball were both launched in 1986. (These in turn owed a debt to Foul (1972-1976) which had a punk sensibility before punk.) Off the Ball founder Adrian Goldberg wrote in the first issue:

“It is frustration that has led to the formation of OTB.We as supporters refuse to lie down and allow a self-elected clique with no other authority than their personal wealth to determine the nature of our pleasure”.

WSC, by the way, has just reached issue 250.

While it’s hard to see – right now – the ‘big four’ of the Premiership having problems, if only because of the way they and their European counterparts are able to rig the entry rules of the lucrative Euro competitions in their favour (why should a club finishing third – third out of four – in a Champions’ league group get a second chance in the UEFA Cup?), there are signs of a fragility in their base. Kids are more likely to support them than their local teams (there are, according to BMRB, more Chelsea fans in Bolton than Bolton supporters) but they can’t afford to get to many matches and are more likely to switch alleigance if form slips. Long-term fans are deterred by prices – the prices of everything, from tickets to ‘colours’.

And I was struck by a post on a Sunderland fans’ list from a long-term supporter who said that watching his local team, Histon (now in the same division as Ebbsfleet), had given him more pleasure than Sunderland’s promotion back to the Premiership.

So there’s a real gap opened up here between football as celebrity and football as community. It seems to me likely that more fans will choose to support both a ‘famous’ club and a local one. The local one will be easy to get to and won’t cost a fortune, while the famous one will as like as not be followed via television or online. The problem with Ebbsfleet and MyFootballClub is that it has the appearance of a community initiative – it’s fans, it’s the internet – but none of the substance. When you strip away the spurious grassroots pizazz over the online part, there’s no difference between MyFootballClub buying Ebbsfleet and A.N.Multinational Tycoon acquiring Liverpool, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Manchester City or Chelsea.

Other sports-related posts: : A sustainable football stadium; Cycling, doping, and the pace of change.

• Sustainability is about flows, not stuff
• Those flows have to include knowledge as well as materials
• Sustainability needs social, public, and community engagement

The project has been well-documented on the website, but it’s worth pulling out a few personal moments of illumination.

Illumination 1: The ‘NESCO’ energy project, basically a prototype social enterprise model which is designed to use the ability to buy energy wholesale and resell it as a mechanism to reward people who reduce their consumption – so they gain more than just the value of the energy they’re saved. It was linked to an ‘energy dashboard’ which showed the level (and cost) of energy consumed in real time, and your target for the day, basically a constant reminder to switch stuff off.

It was displayed along with a project called Low Carb Lane, in Ashington, which was wrestling with how to get people to start thinking about energy consumption. The scale of the challenge – a healthy dose of realism – was captured in a quote from a resident which said, from memory, “I’m more worried about what the local arsonist will burn next than saving on energy”.

Illumination 2: A project which was designed to contrast the richness of individual lives with the way in which they – and their neighbourhoods – are classified by geodemographic systems such as Acorn. Landscape/Portrait is a project developed by artist Kevin Carter which uses a website to ask people questions about themselves and their neighbourhood (anyone in the UK can join in if they register) and enables you to contrast that with the geodemographic profile. Having worked for companies which use Acorn-based profiling, I liked the quiet subversion of this. One of the project team told me that some visitors had got quite angry when they started to understand the Acorn methodology and read their neighbourhood’s profile for the first time. There’s an interesting question about accountability of commercial organisations in here.

Illumination 3: TREE – a fantastic piece of graphic design by design student Daniel Foster-Smith which enables you, quickly, to ‘read’ how much resources a product consumes, how long it should last for, and how much of the materials are capable of being recycled and how much go to landfill.

There are other great things here as well: the ‘necklace’ is effectively a linear park but a virtual one, while the Middlesbrough urban farming project is, I suspect, the shape of towns to come. My wife found the schools-based eco-challenge inspirational (the booklet of stories and case studies which was handed out at the exhibition doesn’t seem to be online yet).

John and the core team are continuing for a few months to ensure the project has a legacy in the area, but it wasn’t clear how long the website would remain extant. I hope it will be preserved as a resource for others interested in sustainable design; if One North East (the regional development agency) can’t do this, I’d hope that there’s an academic institution in the region which can mirror the site.

Finally, while checking links, I found a post by John Thackara on the ‘ten power laws’ of 21st century innovation from mid-2006 which seems to have underscored the practice of DOTT 07. The post is a little corrupted so I’ve re-posted the principles here:

Power Law 1: Don’t think “new product” – think social value.

Power Law 2: Think social value before “tech”.

Power Law 3: Enable human agency. Design people into situations, not out of them.

Power Law 4: Use, not own. Possession is old paradigm.

Power Law 5: Think P2P, not point-to-mass.

Power Law 6: Don’t think faster, think closer.

Power Law 7: Don’t start from zero. Re-mix what’s already out there.

Power Law 8: Connect the big and the small.

Power Law 9: Think whole systems (and new business models, too).

Power Law 10: Think open systems, not closed ones.

Other posts on DOTT 07: DOTT’s top design/sustainability books.

The evidence on the benefits of trees is well-summarised on a webpage maintained by Warwick District Council. Research by Kuo and Sullivan found that crime rates and domestic violence are reduced by as much as 50% in urban areas with a high proportion of trees.