Thursday, September 23, 2010

The Great Bean Bag Chair Experiment

The Darling Library provides a comfortable, convenient, functional space conducive to studying. Now that more and more students bring their laptops, connect to the wireless network and plug in, we find that electrical outlets are at a premium. But some are out of reach because the seating arrangements.
Big Buai and Orlando check out the bean bag chairs.
Therefore, we purchased two types of bean bag chairs to conduct an experiment. Will students use them near the under-used electrical outlets? Which one (if either) will they like better? Will they move them around in order to better take advantage of resources available to them to just play around? Will they ignore them because they are too big? too small? too hot? too cold?

Perhaps two are not enough to discover the true value of these chairs. We will observe how they are used this semester and solicit feedback from students. Then we will decide whether to buy more and, if so, which type and where they should go.

Leave a comment to let us know what you think.

2 comments:

Emma Hartman said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Emma Hartman said...

I think bean bag chairs is a great idea to create a more comfortable environment in the library. More of these would definitely be better to facilitate comfortable group work environments and visual consistency in that general area.

One concern that may arise with continued use of these bean bag chairs though is clutter in the walking space between the stairs and the second floor. Because students will be studying on the floor, it may create a traffic problem if there are too many (messy) students in that area at once. I would suggest that bean bag chairs in the more underused corners of the second floor would be advantageous as well, allowing students to study in comfort out of the way of traffic and distraction. I understand that this defeats the purpose of using the outlets in the center of the library but I'm sure you can come up with some more creative solutions to this problem :D

Anyways, looking forward to further expansion and improvement of the library environment!