Thesis Overview

Network the books with a shelf, allowing the user to experience viscerally the book, and its connections.

Research:

These photos were taken in the New York Public Library.

Here's a visualization the main floor. "X" denotes people. Most of the people at this library are using the library for its technology, not for books. Only a coulple of people occupy the stacks.

Hopefully, the Illuminated Shelves will merge both digital and physical spaces.

Readings:

"Design becomes powerful only when it enters the domain of other discourses." -Michel Foucault

"Foucault looked at the apparent physical unity of the printed book as a prototype for the unity of a professional discourse. A book, while appearing to be a complete, self-contained object - a model of thingness - is, in fact, dispersed across a network of other texts. Likewise, the cumulative knowledge of a discipline is not an 'enormous book that is gradually and continuously being written,' but is, instead, a 'system of dispersion.'"
- Design Writing Research, Ellen Lupton & Abbott Miller

Prototype experience:

Design Iteration: