A while back, the Economist published one of its special sections, this one on mobile computing — intro entitled “Nomads at last”. This is a prominent theme, as we’ve seen, in the new wave of network-induced changes that some are referring to as “Web 3.0″, but what makes this section particularly interesting is that its focus is upon the social rather than technical aspects of this change:

SHERRY TURKLE, the psychologist at MIT who studies the nexus between people and gadgets, believes that the tools of mobility are leading to “the emergence of a new type of person”.

Which may not involve an actual speciation event, of course — though that might be something to contemplate — but it does seem to involve some significant implications for the ways in which we think of space or spaces, from urban geographical, to travel, to local, to personal. That includes the structures we erect to define internal spaces — what The Economist calls the “new oases” — and that includes libraries. In that connection, it’s interesting to compare the description of the structure used to represent this impact — MIT’s “Stata Centre” (sic) — with UBC’s new Irving K. Barber Centre:

Stata, says William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT who worked with Mr Gehry on the centre’s design, was conceived as a new kind of “hybrid space”.

This is best seen in the building’s “student street”, an interior passage that twists and meanders through the complex and is open to the public 24 hours a day. It is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing. No part of the student street is physically specialised for any of these activities. Instead, every bit of it can instantaneously become the venue for a seminar, a snack or romance.

The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century.

Via Lorcan Dempsey