Everett News Cafe Display Design
There is a small cafe on the first floor of the Gottesman Libraries called Everett Cafe. The library had been displaying various contents in the cafe in the past, but without getting much attention from the patrons. I collaborated with Jihii Jolly to re-design the book display, and with Jennifer Govan to create the weekly historic news display in the cafe.
Design Opportunity
The Everett Cafe, being the only cafe at Teachers College, is naturally one of the most high-traffic areas in the building. Jihii saw an opportunity to use the space to feature collections of books that were timely and relevant to current events around the world. I was brought into the project to figure out the visual and physical aspects of the book display.
In order to understand the space and the patrons’ behavior in the cafe, I spent some time observing the people there. I noticed that there were three major categories of people in the cafe: patrons who were there to get coffee and snacks, patrons who were using the cafe as a meetup spot, and patrons who sat down for long periods of time studying. During busy hours, the line for the cafe got extremely long and every seat got filled. Observing this, I thought that it would be useful to target the patrons who are waiting in line for coffee, as the line tended to form right next to where the book display would be.
EdLab had already made past attempts at putting up a book display in the cafe. However, I quickly learned that those past book displays were not engaging enough to attract any attention from the patrons. Some of the patrons even asked me, while I was tidying up the books, if it was a shelf for donating unwanted books. Furthermore, the colorful walls and floors of the cafe interior were fighting for attention as well. I realized that the book display would have to be visually engaging in order to get any attention from the patrons.
First Prototype of Book Display
Based on what I learned from the observations, I set up the first prototype. At this stage, my top priority was to display the books facing front, like how bookstores showcase popular books. I gathered shelves that were not in use, made a small pedestal, and prepared a large backdrop with a blurb explaining the book collection.
The prototype was a success and a lot of the books actually got checked out by the patrons. Based on this experiment, I built a set of custom shelves for the cafe books, so that as many book covers could be shown facing front in order to attract attention.
Display Design for the Book Collections
Below are some of the designs I created for the News Cafe book display. The books were curated by Jihii (and later Jennifer Govan) every 6-8 weeks.
Display Shelf Design
“Today in History” Display Design
In this portion of the project, I worked with Jennifer Govan, who is a Senior Librarian at the Gottesman Libraries, to design a template for the “Today in History” display. The news articles were curated by Jennifer on a weekly basis, and I used the template to create a collage of headlines each week. The collages were displayed on a large screen on the cafe wall to appeal to the patrons waiting in line for coffee.
Below are few of the collages that I designed for this project.
