Sawyer is one of the few places I love to work in. I love working at quiet, open, and most of all sceneric places. It’s so soothing when everything around you is silent and aesthetically pleasing. Unpopular opinion, but I never found Sawyer “distracting” while working. Just the fact that I’m surrounded by elegance helps me focus more (AKA it actually feels like I’m hard-working).
But I digress, as usual. I’m here to talk about good design!
The books in Sawyer are placed in shelves that slide back and forth. This is pretty clever, since the library can save space (although the library is already huge) and therefore can store more books in more shelves. It’s also really cool because you can slide multiple shelves if you slide just one shelf. And the tool you can use to slide the shelves look like this:
I love this thing. I never read books, but I find myself playing with these shelves all the time by rotating this thing over and over again. It’s very simple but says so much about what it does. First, its location – what else would it be used for other than to slide the shelves? Also, its shape implies a circular frame and thus the action to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise. The handles that stick out of the ends of each bridge show that we should grab onto them whenever we want to rotate the device.
No arrows to indicate where to rotate. No signs to tell us what actions to partake. Just simple geometry that allows you to grab that book about Mongolian warfare if the aisle between the shelves are too narrow.
I don’t have to stand there for minutes and think about what it does. I don’t even have to play around with it to understand its purpose. I just look at it and know what it does. Its signifiers are concise and all signify the device’s affordance: sliding shelves. I enjoy it, but even better, I understand it. Next time you run into me in the library and catch me playing around with the sliding shelves, you now know why. Although this article probably doesn’t justify the fact that I’m super weird.