Sense & Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility is a Practice Technologies 4 course focused on designing a public satellite library or pop-up reading room. Students are required to identify a vacant or soon-to-be-vacant shopfront in the Melbourne CBD or inner-city areas such as Chapel Street, South Yarra, to serve as their proposed site.

The proposed intervention should be treated as a pilot project. If successful, it has the potential to become a permanent public reading room and sensory retreat, decentralising indoor public spaces and opportunities for rest, study and gathering. Public community libraries are one of the last remaining public spaces which do not require membership to enter. They become a home away from home for students; a place of warmth for the homeless and elderly; free learning & entertainment for children; an extended living room for urban residents.

Engaging with universal design principals, genuine indoor public spaces with no cost of admission or pressure to purchase goods, facilitate more equitable participation in our cities. Importantly, these retreat spaces allow individuals with neurodiversity and sensory needs to pause and regroup as they journey through the bustling urban context.

The design response should consider local demographics, context and culture whilst ambitiously subverting expectations of a public library space.