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Microlibrary
By : Bélanger Branding Design
GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 16th edition
Discipline : Product
Categories : Industrial Design / Product - Signage : Platinum Winner
The City of Candiac is acquiring micro libraries to enhance the surroundings of its parks and public spaces. Bélanger, a long-time partner of the City for its signage needs, seized this opportunity to design a hybrid object; at once a signage and identity marker; and a totem of an emerging, participatory and community-based mode of exchange.
This urban furniture is a small self-service library that offers the opportunity to promote reading and democratize culture through the spontaneous encounter of a passerby and a book right in the public space. The concept is simple: users are invited to take and exchange books as they wish, based on the principle of sharing. Everyone can borrow or return books as they please. This initiative thus provides direct access to books in a fun way and allows citizens to be reached in an outdoor setting.
Combining their knowledge of the City and their experience in developing objects for the entire population, Bélanger was able to create a street library that is lively, colorful, adapted, identity-based and innovative.
Made of aluminum and wood, its durability responds to frequent use and to locations subject to the elements; its modern design allows for integration into the City’s identity and the place that houses it for decades to come.
Its exterior form allows for universal access to its books, whose formats can vary and still find a place in its interior form.
As reading and sitting often go hand in hand, it seemed obvious to the designers to combine the function of a bench with that of a micro-library; more than just a box for sharing books, this makes the object a true reading station.
Illustrated with images specially made by the team according to the surrounding places and activities, its human, playful and joyful vocation, as an integral part of the place, is highlighted.
The collection thus conceived serves as the basis for a new branch of the City’s family of signage objects, with a community function, recognizable lines, whose potential for variation is an invitation to discover a new mode of interaction between the city and its community, to explore a new relationship between the human and the space that surrounds him.
