Afterword – Designing for Laughter: Seven Concepts for Inventing the Future of Academic Communities – pub. 2020

Marie S.A. Sorensen’s Afterword to Beyond the Information Commons: A Field Guide to Evolving Library Services, Technologies, and Spaces, 2nd Ed. was published in 2020 by Rowman & Littlefield. Charles Forrest and Martin Halbert are the book’s editors. Citations to this publication are available on Academia.edu and Researchgate.net.

Afterword: For me, to design buildings for colleges and universities, I want to be immersed in the culture. I talk to a lot of researchers, scholars, and librarians about how they’re doing their jobs and what they’re trying to discover. I want the world to be a cooler, more humane, more enriched place, and I think libraries have a really important role in doing that. In the notes that follow, I’ve named seven categories that structure my thinking about what matters when designing academic communities: tribe, power, crossroads, subject, detail, den, and skunkworks. These are not purely architectural, technological, or pedagogical themes. They are cognitive, anthropological, social, style-based, and formative: the DNA of this realm.

This new book updates this review of current practice in the Information Commons and other new kinds of facilities inspired by the same needs and intents. This book is an attempt to answer the question: “What might be the next emerging concept for a technology-enabled, user-responsive, mission-driven form of the academic library?”

Featured image above is from Tender Loving Empire, a retail store in Portland, OR – photograph copyright 2016, Sorensen Partners.