Collaborating on learning space design

Libraries are the intellectual commons where learners interact with knowledge in both physical and virtual environments to enhance their lifelong learning experience. This community idea exchange highlights the space design transformation of well-established academic libraries from traditional to up-to-date style for state of the art service offering. It displays the current situation and an aspirational one while maintaining the ongoing flow of services for their community and beyond.

Specifically, it describes how space design is tailored to customer demands for innovative service offerings. Ongoing analysis of current learning space design is essential to determine it suitability for growing needs of students, researchers and faculty for the development of more conducive pedagogical spaces. Learning spaces can be categorized into virtual and physical spaces. Further, physical spaces are considered with respect to entrance, central and auxiliary areas of the library building.

The virtue of this idea exchange is that it is a practical experience for matching current trends in innovative learning space design aiming at offering inclusive learning environment. Hence, it serves to promote a customer centric learning space design, while creating deliverables that benefit for the wider academic community. The concrete takeaways are the learning process of the continuous monitoring and evaluation of the current space in alignment with changing users’ demands as per evolving technologies, as well as the shared experience of responsiveness to change.