Possible Futures

Announcements

• This week’s guest speaker is Brandon Klevence from Maker Jawn
• Next week, Feb 19 we will brainstorm project ideas and form groups for your projects – Professor Buckleitner will be traveling
• Tim Wisniewski, Chief Data Officer, The City of Philadelphia – Brown Bag Lunch Feb 20, 12:30-1:30 & 3:00-4:00 @ IMM
• Feb 26 your group will formally present your project concept
• Sat, March 21 – NJ Maker Day

Design Notebook Discussion

First, let’s give a few of you an opportunity to present your Design Notebook entries for last week.

Next, let’s go around the room, sharing your ethnographies:

• Can we build a set of common patron types?
• Who did we expect to see but did not?
• Why not?

How about library resources you all identified?

• Can we create a master list of common (and not-so-common) library resources?
• Were there resources NOT there that you expected would be?
• How do you explain their absence?

Break

Take 5 to stretch our legs and reflect on what we’ve worked on so far today.

Guest Speaker

Brandon Klevence – Maker Jawn Initiative of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Here is a video of Brandon’s talk.

Brandon is Lead Mentor and Prototyper at the Free Library of Philadelphia with a background in Industrial Design, Interactive Installations and the Built Environment. He helped pilot maker programming at the Free Library in 2013 working within a variety of different spaces and contexts. Currently, he acts as a resource to library staff, artists and mentors to develop and implement new projects and programing. This is done through the Maker Jawn Initiative, a working group at the Free Library which he has helped form, grow and maintain.

Assignment

Background Research

1. Review your Design Notebook, notes on your library visits, patron ethnographies and resource inventories, as well as the presentations about Mediatech, the Free Libraries of Trenton and Flemington, and Marker Jawn at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
2. Start thinking about final project ideas.
3. Think about the difference between new ways of accessing information at the library vs. libraries as places to create. Will your project be about media consumption, media creation, or both?
4. Jot down a few keywords, make a napkin sketch or two, get something representative of your ideas on paper.
5. Come to class next week prepared to share your project ideas. We’ll sort through all your ideas and organize into project teams.

Design Notebook

1. Create a new page in your Design Notebook and title it “Project Ideas” and today’s date. Make a list of your ideas, representing them in words, images, sound and/or video.
2. Create another page in your Design Notebook and title it “Projects In the Wild” and today’s date. Search the web for existing projects similar to yours that have been tried elsewhere. How successful have they been? How is your idea similar? Based on the experiences of those projects, what would you do differently?

*Assignments are due before class begins on Thursdays. Be prepared to present your work in class for discussion.