What the library needs are cellphone booths.

I see students in the Library talking in the stairwells.  That doesn’t make sense.  We should embrace this phenomena, just handle it better.  Eg. acoustically.

Accommodating folks’ communication needs removes one more reason to leave the library.

James Turrell, Danae - this planar effect is the inspiration

Here's the concept & drawings, courtesy of the book The Other Horizon

First experiment, how to see a screen with fresh eyes

So from quick experiments, it seems pulling the "mask" forward, several inches away from the screen, makes for a nicer effect

Today made some quick sketches for Bibliotheca. We’re making something with a screen element, but we want it to feel different. Not screeney. Looking to James Turrell’s execution of his pieces for inspiration.

A little testing points to some strategies to maintain the mild, if any, visual freshness that this makes.  Don’t have things pass from side to side, eg. come in and out of the frame.  Keep a padding of uniform color around the edges, so everywhere the physical edge and the digital plane intersect, it’s just color, nothing clipped because “off screen”.

So I ran across this web service boomerang, http://www.boomeranggmail.com/,  through hacker news.  You can get your gmails sent back to you at future dates to remind you of things.  That and some other services.

unthoughtout question: are they in the business of selling time?

So along with Libraries, I’m pretty into the Post Office.  It’s an old practice to mail yourself something as a way to prove date of event, etc. So people do mail themselves things.  But what’s a postal boomerang?  Send this thing to me in two weeks?  It’s definitely a higher bandwidth communication channel – (though it assumes you check the mail).

So a logistics question: With normal mail, but in a boomerang-style delayed receipt situation, could the post office guarantee that a piece of mail will arrive on a certain date?

What’s a cost trade off look like between fast service with estimated arrival date – vs.- slower service, but precise of arrival time.  Maybe the post office could become exceedingly punctual…

You know when they say, rent this movie theater out for your next event digital event or whatever, I wonder what that’s like.

Could/does some education belong in a movie theater?

It’s definitely a great institution/infrastructure to latch into.

So I went to the MIT Media Laboratory.  It was eye-opening, taught me to think a bit more like an engineer (though I can’t code for anything) and generally was awesome and kind of brutal.  So I’ve been through that environment, and looking at Libraries in the future, they should be a lot more like that place than many other institutions.

So what about this notion: ”the Media Library”?

So I was talking to Natalie this morning.  About a bunch of ideas I had.  I was asking her how I should organize them.  She was like, you should just make a blog.  And I was like, oh, Ben who I’m collaborating with for this class Bibliotheca, he’s got a blog too:  http://benbrady.wordpress.com/ 

So a convergence of forces, and now I’m posting online.

Those are the criteria though that I’m trying to meet, flexible space (post range of thoughts), low bar (crappy ideas belong here too).