 Hello, I'm Pam Horn director of cross-platform publishing and strategic partnerships for Cooper Hugh at Smithsonian Design Museum I'm so pleased to welcome you to this evening's event Our design talk tonight was is inspired by by the people designing a better America and we'd like to To give a special thanks to Rebson Foundation for their support of tonight's program. I Imagine looking out at you. You are probably similar to me. You have some Great memories as a child from your public library growing up This I've been waiting for this talk and this topic is one that really resonates for so many When Andrew Carnegie built this mansion at the turn of this century He had already embarked on his ambitious plan to construct close to 1700 public libraries across the United States with the intention of empowering ordinary people to access knowledge needed for advancement Open to all classes and races Carnegie's libraries transform the diffusion of knowledge in America and there are now close to 120,000 neighborhood libraries throughout the United States What's even more impressive is that over two-thirds of the country's population possesses a library card With Carnegie's original educational mission in mind Librarians designers and communities are now thinking beyond the books and the built environment of the public library is being reimagined as a vibrant hub of civic engagement as A result libraries have become critical resources for communities to learn connect and grow Enjoying access to everything from new technology maker spaces to live performances and career coaching This evening we will hear from two influential collaborators in the movement to rethink and rebuild the public library both of whom were integral contributors to design projects included in by the people If you miss the opportunity to see this groundbreaking exhibition, you can still be inspired by its contents The exhibition is online at Cooper Hewitt org and the by the people catalog is up is for sale in our shop Both resources are chock full of useful information In-depth interviews and inspiring ideas for designing a better America Our first presenter will be Zena Howard Principal and architect from the firm Perkins and well an interdisciplinary research oriented architecture and design firm Zena has more than 25 years of experience with private and public institutions museums and cultural facilities libraries and higher education facilities. She is also a lead a lead accredited Professional as well as a member of the American Institute of Architects and National Organization of Minority Architects Her notable projects include the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and The International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina She all she was also project manager for two of the branch libraries redesigned for the DC neighborhood libraries project featured in by the people Next we will hear from Nate Hill. Nate is the executive director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council Which works to develop and maintain essential library services throughout New York City and Westchester County Prior to assuming leadership of the council Nate was the deputy director of the Chattanooga public library where he led the development of the fourth floor project and if an innovative transportation transformation excuse me of 12,000 square feet of storage space in the city's main branch Into an active experimentation lab that was also featured in by the people in addition to his work at the library Nate served on the board of Chattanooga's Enterprise Center as well as the nonprofit causeway and Was named a mover and shaker by library journal in 2012 Unfortunately Sarah Goldhagen could not join us tonight because she is ill. Please feel better Sarah and Now please welcome Cynthia Smith curator of by the people and the museum's curator of socially responsible design to the podium Cynthia is an internationally renowned curator in the field of In the field and by the people is the third of a series of exhibitions. She has curated For Cooper Hewitt on the subject of humanitarian design She will share more about by the people and Following Xena and Nate's presentations will moderate the discussion. Welcome Cynthia. Thank you Hello everyone Just wanted to show you the catalog if anybody is interested. It is a really quite beautiful catalog and really some very interesting Essays and interviews along with Every one of all the 60 projects that are included in by the people so As Pam mentioned by the people designing a better America Close this past month after Rather successful run It highlights 60 projects from around the US that address the complex issues social and spatial Inequalities in urban suburban and rural communities You can still view Two of the designs that are included in the exhibition on the first floor So police station by studio gang is still on display in the great hall as you walked in by the admissions desk And also in our process lab This is a hands-on activity lab You can learn more about Why what you value both individually and as a community how that might manifest In the built environment There's a whole series of activities you can take but that's based on a project out of Philadelphia Gray area so it's well with your time if you're in the neighborhood to come back and Take a look at those Those few bits from by the people so truly truly democratic institutions bring people together from all walks of life in public libraries are Democratic institutions They're playing Increasingly important role in our civic social and economic Life of cities and towns around the United States and they're proving to be a critical 21st century resource for today's knowledge and innovation economy meeting a range of needs for a growing portion of our population From newly arriving Immigrants to young entrepreneurs. They're often a neighborhood's only access to digital networks and Skills essential for full participation in this information economy by tonight's focus on public libraries explores two innovative designs from Chattanooga and Washington DC and both of those were featured in by the people designing a better America By the people calls for bridging divides for a shared prosperity design brings form to ideas and provides the necessary tools for people to advocate for their future Which is increasingly important as the US confronts multiple challenges in this new century These designers and librarians are not deterred They're already envisioning designing and building a more just and equitable equitable America So our first speaker tonight will be Zena Howard, so please welcome Zena Howard Well, good evening very glad to be here and I was Fortunate enough to see the by the people exhibit before it went down last month So encouraged to see all the work by the people and just happy to be a part of the design profession and the architecture profession that expresses work in a very different way that is also by the people so I'm gonna start talking a little bit about Libraries as we understood them everybody knows this image. This is yesterday quite familiar with the sort of stuffy Perception that libraries have but here we are today And I want to sort of roll through how we got here with libraries that are light and airy and with libraries that Have become have redefined help to redefine the way that they're used in for social and civic purposes so Libraries today as you look at each of the images they celebrate the the Goals and missions and values of the people that they serve Not just places as thought of long ago just to house books. We have digital media as you see in the in the Here we have rooms digital media down here at the bottom we have rooms that are used to gather and Allow people to collaborate. We also have spaces that are what we call Mixing up or blending of uses so libraries are now Places where you can have interpretive elements inserted such as what you would see at a museum there are also places for Education and also entertainment and gathering So I want to roll through a couple of examples of Developing and it's one of these projects You'll recognize if you saw the exhibit for the for the people was featured there But the connection to our environment and our values are extremely important So I'll start with the Anacostia neighborhood library And I have an example here of Anacostia and that's that's the actual site the site is Located in the southeast portion of DC not too far from the Anacostia River So as we looked at this project and looked at the context We understood that the Anacostia River is actually one of the dirtiest rivers in the United States so we have a social responsibility to address that issue We also understood that this that this project Are the location of our project was in an area that was highly residential very low-scale buildings But there were some areas there that were large green spaces And you'll see that on the next slide. So this is the context of these small low-scale commercial spaces But you had an area such as this that had had large green spaces with the Significant building floating in the in a green and that ended up being the old Frederick Douglas house So we took our cues from that and we said, okay Here's the site that I just referred to the Frederick Douglas site and there's our site. So large Buildings there in the context of the city or large sites So we floated the building in the middle of the site and that was a response to the Frederick Douglas house This Anacostia neighborhood is predominantly African-American and to connect back to that history of Frederick Douglas in the middle of this some surrounding community was was very important Here's a way that that we sort of some of the sketches elevated the building on on the platform or raised the building up and We had this notion of creating what we called a large living room Looked at this as a living room and put a large green roof over it Why was this important? Well when we started engaging with the community here And I'll back up a little bit these libraries when we started the effort to put libraries in DC under Jenny Cooper who was in the library director a program called all 21st century libraries We went into several neighborhoods to do that but this particular neighborhood When we started engaging with them they thought well, we just want a library We we really we really as long as we get a building We really don't care what it looks like just just give us the library by the time we were through engaging with them They understood that no we want a library for us We want our library and we have some say in it because we made sure they understood we could not do our job Without hearing from them about what they needed in their library So we became invested in these issues that we're talking about the large population of children for one the Notion that of connecting back to something that was meaningful to them Which was the Frederick Douglass house and this idea of having the library appeared as a large living room or gathering space So one of the things we did This neighborhood also had the largest number of children per capita We wanted to celebrate that and put the children up front So that the library was something that they felt Connected to and no one was afraid to just celebrate that notion of children So that became important The other thing that we did is I mentioned earlier that the Anacostia River is one of the dirtiest rivers in the United States so We took an opportunity to educate the entire community and they absolutely love this and this was about doing a bio retention pond here to this to the west side To clean groundwater before we dumped it back into the river to naturally clean that and all of these Principles once you get the community invested in them it really speaks to our notions of Sustainability and resiliency Because we know that when we as designers we walk away So we want to make sure that the community is is there to protect the buildings Everyone thought oh, you know five years from now that the building could have graffiti on it It could have the windows, you know damaged in it or it could be subject to some sort of um, you know civil unrest but this these places have become truly places of engagement and Really places of action and places of community So I'll float through these are some early studies that we did when we were looking at these notions of sustainability And here's the building as it exists today Large green roof green was a strong color representing this notion of Being green giving back to the environment a large roof that shades to the west side as you see here The spaces on the inside are light and airy and this was another thing light and air and And breathing which is quite a contrast to the earlier first slide that I showed you that we most of us I hope you've lived long enough or accustomed to seeing those those dark spaces Bringing in and harvesting daylighting the community understood these principles. It wasn't just Nice architecture to look at they understood and bought into the notion of why we were doing this and we're highly supportive Last project. I want to talk about is the Tinley friendship Library which was on the northeast side of Washington, DC in a completely different type of neighborhood This is an urban very urban context of the city and the Tinley friendship area is probably Second to Georgetown. I believe and in the mount of of of wealth and influence. That's in this particular area So they sort of had a different mission here We looked at the grid and how that urban energy of that part of the city was coming to fruition and we sort of got excited and wanted to get the Users engaged on that end we looked at what we all value in libraries Which is the notion of a book although books and and the way people? Interpreting and acquire knowledge is through different media, but the but the genesis or the substance of that is the book So we looked at how we can leverage that Notion of the book as a as a as a rapper You know it has a binder than it has these free-flowing pages But also get engaged in these in these elements of sustainability and green roofs and sustaining the culture so what we did here was You know the sort of different this is just contrasting the different values of Communities where the Anacostic community said we love our children. We want to put them front and center The Tinley friendship community said we love our children We want to have a space for them on one floor and we would love for the adults to be able to gather and collect and and share Thoughts and commune together on an on another floor. So this isn't what we did here is Is look at that but also in the context of Environmental and sustainable goals. So what you see happening here is how we created light and and Brought light into a lot of these spaces up on the upper floor where the adults are But in a way that we protected it clearly from the negative aspects of solar which is heat gain and also glare This is the result you're looking at Photography from the you can see how These spaces are are wonderful, you know, they're used in in so many different ways People do not just use libraries to come and be alone. They're places of very to cultivate thought leadership and discourse and all of these Airy light spaces facilitate that. We are also able here to memorialize sort of the timeline again bringing an interpretive elements of Tinley friendship and the neighborhood there That's it. Thank you Nate Such gorgeous buildings. That was awesome. Thanks Hi there My name is Nate Hill I'm gonna give you a little bit of background about who I am and where I came from before I jump right into this I actually had no idea that I was going to get into libraries. I studied painting and design as an undergraduate and Moved to New York City and really did my best at that for a little while and then needed a real job So I fell into a job at the Brooklyn Public Library at the Stone Avenue branch in the year 2000 and Just absolutely fell in love with this kind of work I Worked there and all across Brooklyn in different libraries in different roles for quite a while until I decided I needed to up and move To San Jose and retrain as a web designer and web developer for libraries Right around 2008 seemed like the right thing to do it was wonderful and Sort of mind-expanding for me, but I found that I really missed Working directly with the public when I was doing that and so it's sitting in that cubicle I did some cool stuff I got to make like a local history app that you know You could browse historical collections on your phone while you're moving around through San Jose called scan Jose Which is pretty clever, right? But I really missed actually like working with people so when the opportunity came up to you move to chat Nougat, Tennessee Which was then being touted as the gig city the first gigabit city because the local Electric utility was actually managing a network and offering gigabit speeds to The residents I saw this opportunity to go and really shake up what a library could be in this other kind of community So this is chat Nougat fascinating city 170,000 people or so Once considered one of like the dirtiest cities in the country in the 1970s It was called out is that but really has Reinvented itself and is just a fascinating place to be the kind of civic pride that people have in this city I've kind of never seen anywhere else It's like everybody is constantly working together to try to make this a better place And so I saw this 1970s like brutalist building and I said alright. I'm all in I can do this The beauty of this though is that the top floor of this building was whole Angled kind of facade was actually used for this for like 20 years This was people's approaches that they just took all of their crap and they put it in the attic because it was hard to throw it out What an opportunity right so we started to take this and we started to rethink What can the library be in this space? So the thing that has always gotten me jazzed about libraries is not just that libraries are great Warehouses of media for you to go to and consume But there's an opportunity now for libraries to also be centers for cultural production That you can have access to tools in these places that libraries are ultimately just a pool of shared Resources and that you can go to these places and you can make things you can do things for your community So we started emptying this place out. There's some of the technology that was featured in the space at first Important equipment that you want to find in all libraries. Oh and the tax records for the city of Chattanooga Got to do something about that So it was really a mess But like out of mess comes some of the greatest opportunities because you really have to be scrappy and think about how you're gonna get stuff done So what I hope you're gonna start to see here is more of a design pattern and a way to operate as you're trying to create change in Some of these places because a lot of the work that we have to do these days in libraries is really retrofitting, right? So we clean the place up a lot of mopping You know many many years of grime and then all of a sudden you've waxed this floor and you've got this kind of killer space, right? It's 12,000 square feet of open space almost too much space to really work with and the first thing that we did is we had to think about Chattanooga itself, right? So everything I'm gonna show you here. They were some good ideas for Chattanooga But again, I want you to think of this as a pattern that these are ways of operating But like there's no point in going and copying any of the things exactly that you see here because it's different everywhere So we're looking across Chattanooga and how this this city was branding itself what it was all about who was coming to Chattanooga who had been in Chattanooga and really there was this huge Entrepreneurial push in this place so the designers and developers were moving to this place really quickly because of the Infrastructure that was offered there rather than anywhere else. So we knew that that was a new audience that we could engage the AIGA is local chapter which This is an audience that is familiar with that group was just kind of like getting kick started They had been around they kind of floundered and then they were trying to come back So we said all right, let's do the first thing we're gonna do here is start to identify Who the users are who are the people are going to be the partners to power this space because like I can't do that all myself Right. There's no way and this was the very first thing that happened on the fourth floor They brought in some teachers and started teaching HTML and CSS and JavaScript In this space up there and it filled up in like three minutes, right? And so we started to get this direction of like, okay, this is what people want Let's do more and more of this and so it was the beginning of All kinds of important library work, right? Sometimes you have to have fun as well You have to have find ways to bring in the people who are going to make this space like animated and activated and exciting this was through Partnership with the design school the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. There's a brilliant Design professor there named Aggie Toppins who just decided that she wanted to make the zine library on the fourth floor And we said all right, cool. Why don't you do it? Just come on in So this is like part of this pattern of letting go of control letting the community dictate What is actually going to go on in the space and just saying okay here are the parameters you can work with in Go to town on this one of the other things that we started there the digital public library of America was still in its planning stages and At this point we had one of their app fests This was the first hackathon that we threw on the fourth floor We did a lot of these and a lot of different contexts later on But this was when we started to get to kick the tires and realize that so much of our work was going to be event-based And so you don't know until you do things like this You don't know until you there's some actual action that you are gonna be a great projection space, right? That like things like that look really good on the well the blue screen doesn't look super good on the wall But you know where I'm going with this and we started to watch how people actually use the space, right? What makes people comfortable when they come into 12,000 square feet and they're gonna try and get something done? They have to find a way to create these little nooks and crannies and it's very difficult to figure out how to give them Permission to do it. Like what are the kinds of hooks that you can put out there? So people feel like the library is theirs and they can turn it into what they need to turn it into I'm not gonna make like those guys actually put that lamp there. They didn't but you know where I'm going with it the other The other key partner was the local startup accelerator This idea that your public library can be a place for equitable economic development opportunity is tremendous, you know when you go and you see things like incubators and startup accelerators These are places that like you look at the door and you're like a little bit scared You're like am I cool enough to come in here and you're not quite sure By partnering with them and taking their kinds of activities into the fourth floor We get the cool factor out of what they're up to we also start to make it more accessible to a much much more broad audience So we started having events with them This was called will this float and we did a whole series of these in which it's sort of like Shark Tank right people come up They pitch their business idea. There's a contest everyone's voting on Twitter whether or not it was a good idea or a bad idea and And you start to develop this whole new audience that cares about the library, right? They're looking at this and they're saying we had no idea this place was so cool We had no idea that you do all of this The other thing we were able to do by collaborating with them was sort of start off our maker space and This was not just a like we're gonna throw a 3d printer in here and see what happens. This was a matter of collaborating across an entire ecosystem To find the people who are working in additive manufacturing and the factories in the in higher education Across the entire region and what does it mean that we've had this sort of transformational change in the way that things Can be made in this world so we had this massive day And it was like this beautiful spring day that people could have been doing anything that day and they all came to the Library there were like a thousand people came through the library for this and there were lectures And there were all kinds of cool things that you could check out And I don't think I have the same slide next. No, I don't but a very important thing that was featured in the show is Our 3d printer that after that had this little sticker on it like a little hello My name is sticker and it says if you have a library card This is your printer and then we open the space up to the public the next day and people just started flooding in so it was this this pattern again of a Small investment then you watch the usage and then you figure out how you can do more with it if it's successful And these kinds of hacks were the way that we did everything up there What you're looking at that look like fancy screens are actually Pieces of bookshelves with corrugated plastic and an office projector sitting behind them to make it look like it's this cool that up partition the other thing that was really important as we became the sort of The open data hub and civic innovation hub for the city There's a lot of energy goes into these open data projects But if you don't actually have a space that you're pulling people together in and you're not doing anything with this data then it's Then it gets a lot less exciting So we had these national the National Day of Civic Hacking and we got a very important grant from the Knight Foundation to kick off a partnership across the city and the result of this partnership and that's a super wordy slide But so I'll leave it up for just a second But the result of this partnership Was the public library hosting chat new goes open data portal So we have the New York City open data portal Our idea there was that this is just another kind of library collection, right? That we have always had municipal collections and binders and PDFs and such that API should actually live at the library We can preserve and create access to data sets as you know part of our core mission And that's what it looks like. It's I believe it's still up there now So ultimately a lot of this was very organic very kind of free form And we had to take breaks every once in a while and you'd stop and we would have these kind of cluster mapping Exercises and figure out all of the different things that are going on and see how they actually Overlap and it was usually after the fact It wouldn't we wouldn't sit down or anything and like figure it out and then go and do it But you kind of have to keep track of what's going on in a dynamic space like this in order to Yeah, in order to know how to move so I haven't even spoken about many of these initiatives, but So that was chat nougat and I hope that you're gonna have a whole bunch of questions about that I left there about a year and a half ago to come to New York City for a totally different kind of challenge But hopefully I'm using these same kinds of patterns to solve the problems here So I run this organization called the Metropolitan New York Library Council We are the in New York State. There are three different kinds of library systems There are public systems that help the public libraries collaborate with one another There's school library systems that help them collaborate with one another and then there are these councils and we were we've been charged since Like the 50s to help public libraries academic libraries art libraries historical societies All kinds of information professions work together And the way that was originally done is through like book exchanges right interlibrary loan and things like that We still do elements of that, but the interesting challenge here is that now we get to think about what what does digital? Infrastructure like that mean what what is that now? So it's dark enough in here. This might actually work. Does anybody know what the Herman grid is? It's a it's an optical illusion that I like to use as a metaphor for the way that we're trying to work At Metro when you stare at this image you start to see the dots show up between the different Black squares, it's a little gimmicky But what I'm trying to say is what we care about is the space between the organizations that are members We try to figure out how we can help them work together So one way we do this is We are the service hub for the digital public library of America for the entire state of New York we reach out to Organizations big and small all across this state who have digital collections that they're putting online They all describe them differently and kind of crazy sometimes We harvest that metadata and then we take and we clean it and we normalize it and we turn it into something That actually makes sense so it can be fed upstream to the digital public library of America So it's really important Infrastructural work that sometimes doesn't sound super sexy, but it absolutely has to be done So that's sort of the software development side of us The really awesome thing that I'm so excited about is we've just moved to this new space and it's very fourth-floor-ish In in many ways except for the fact that like it's not it doesn't start as a total mess We've actually gotten to work with marble Fairbanks architects to design this thing So that it is exactly what we need from day one. So let me explain a little bit about that Here it is sort of starting to go up. We're at 599 11th Avenue and we are literally just opening So this is the this is what we're doing with this We've split this pace up into a staff area a studio area and a stage area and the studio is very much like a fourth-floor kind of approach to Archives and and other digital projects in New York City. What do I mean by that? We're gonna have really interesting equipment that every single organization can't have themselves again getting back to this idea of Access to tools. So this is a huge book scanner If you're a community archive that is a member of ours that only has like, you know a person working at it You're not gonna buy that right This is Fred the forensic recovery of evidence device. That's I love calling it Fred And you use this for data recovery. You have like old floppy disks. You have busted USB drives You can't get at the the photos on your phone anymore. You can use this to recover this data So all this sort of born digital Archiving material, this is this is what we're focused on and again It's about creating community and inviting people in so I Finally, I'll say that we've started partnering with our first partner organization the transfer collective, which is a amazing group of people came out of a show at the new museum in 2013 they identify marginalized groups that have audio and video material and Like VHS formats and things like that and then they work to transfer that into Digital materials. So we know at Metro. There's no way we're gonna have that AV transfer stack and take all of that on ourselves at first But by bringing in another group like that Then we can actually start to offer those services and build a real community So I hope you can see some of the How some of it is analogous Finally, we have a killer podcast that you should really all subscribe to the library bite geist and I think I put together a little like sign-up page at this URL just so that if you want to get updates and such on our Progress because we're really just getting this new project started. You can Thank you and Thanks so It was This is really for me Excellent to have It's got like all the combination for me. We have a librarian. We have an architect and we're in a museum You know, it's like ding ding ding and I don't know it was really interesting to see Both of your perspectives I'm going to just jump right in and Ask you a big question So my apologies right up front. So why do you think libraries of all of our civic institutions are embracing innovation and Leading the charge into the 21st century with new forms of architecture Expanding services Acting as democratic incubators And embracing their role as this third space Not home or workplace, but this new public gathering space. I saw it reflected in the work that you were Showing with the the two libraries in DC and certainly with your work in Chattanooga It was reflected there and perhaps even currently with your work here in New York City Yeah, so I would Answer that question. It's funny when we started For instance working in the DC area With this program of 21st century libraries reinventing themselves people were saying well, you know with digital age digital media technology coming on board Libraries surely would would be passe at this point But to answer your question, why have they survived and why have they? Completely reinvented themselves and become more important to communities than than ever before I think it's because they were always they started off as being the stalwart of communities and people Recognize that and didn't want to give up they understood that they could be places to to call people together You know all of the wonderful and innovative programs that you have today when with leaders such as you Redefining the way that people can can think about these places and come together I think people began to see them as as really places to call people to action and really places to To cultivate thought they recognize that and the architecture and design Once we realized that that there was momentum for people libraries weren't dead There were momentum and a lot of them Passion for people to bring this back to their communities because they already had tentacles in the community This wasn't something new that we were think we were talking about bringing to communities. It was re Interpreting what was already there and I think that's why there's so much passion behind it Yeah, I think It's an interesting time because a Lot of us are really able to step back now and look at the mission of libraries and Get away from sort of the tactics that we use to accomplish the mission and say okay libraries are about an informed Democracy like really powerful concepts like this and we can say okay books and reading are incredibly Incredibly important to creating an informed democracy What are all of the other things that we can be doing to achieve that mission? so I think that we're just we're in a really exciting time because We are getting past Sort of the the old perception that you were showing of libraries and people are realizing that we can do So many different things that really this is a flexible infrastructure That's ready to be repurposed and rethought it on a dime at any time as long as you're still fulfilling that mission Yes, and I think historically The local library has been this important knowledge resource for the community that you both talked about And it provided anyone and you we had that wonderful photograph of if you had a library card You could use the was it a 3d printer or yeah or Or anything in the library to get information and so Has the advent of new technologies inform the role and design of libraries. I know you are retrofitting And you're designing new ones. Yeah, absolutely technology has it used to be You know back when you know, we started designing libraries. It was all about the item count remember that it was it was it was Let's let's push as much, you know, let's Exactly that as much product that you can have and it's many items where there's books or CDs at that time We're you know, whatever it was That you can have in a library was sort of an indicator of how successful and how much you know How many patrons you can pulse through at that time and then we started saying no It's just the opposite get rid of all of all of the Stuff as you saw the fourth floor get rid of all the stuff the libraries them see of books and Allow people to come in and and use spaces in a way that suits them So we provided these macro spaces, you know the big Spaces that allow people to gather and commune and these little micro spaces that allow them to individually Work or one-on-one work and and cultivate thoughts. So it is it is really changed and digitally You know people come in and I showed a photograph of the digital lab that we did at the Martin Luther King Library that's right in downtown DC that totally just opened up the space put these labs In there put these spaces where people can not only engage one-on-one, but with each other digitally I Think the recipe is power Connectivity wheels and light if you have the right Combination of those four things and are able to remix them in the ways that you need to Then you're you're can you say that again because you said wheels Wheels. Yeah, I believe that everything needs to be on wheels on Coasters and yeah, yeah, it's essential. You have to move your bookshelves around you have to move your everything around And you can still be a conscious decision-maker even when you embrace flexibility, but If you don't have that then it's really hard to get anywhere. So yes power connectivity wheels and light But how do you balance the competing needs? I mean these are really They have all kinds of new diverse activities taking place in these from big community meetings You yours was this, you know kind of open civic hub to smaller quiet study areas to I don't know. There's maker spaces now in many of these or It becomes a place where seniors go to Hang out or immigrants to come get new information or youth programs where kids are It's safe place to go after school, right? There's this whole range of of I would say Different programming needs right how do you how do you address that? Yeah, I would say the the beautiful thing about libraries is that it's the only place that one of the few places that you can go to and Encounter the diversity that you're talking about the retired person the young student to the you know the immigrant or somebody that's That's that's coming that's all different types of people you go there and you end up in some ways Oftentimes engaging with them. So I say how do you accommodate all of those different needs clearly through technology and Digital you can do it and we do do it but also I talked about this layering of different types of spaces and putting everything on casters and flexibility, but we also need to talk about the the the Spaces outside the library, you know the these sort of Outdoor spaces that allow people to begin to commune even before coming in the library So we begin to pay more attention to the space outside the walls when I showed you in a costia and tenly Libraries those places those spaces of learning those spaces of gathering Allowing people to be able to do that and not being so obsessed about that you may let a book may walk away Or you know something like that allowing food and drinks and in the library that that was a huge decision I mean, I remember people just just obsessing for ever about whether or not, you know And it's like come on exactly and it's like well, excuse me Barnes and Noble does it Why are we taking so long for public libraries to understand that that's really important because eating and and Sharing of food is a way that people Connect if I'm a retired person and you're a young student and we happen upon You know to be in the cafe in the library at the same time we can connect and begin to share at a different level so Allowing those chance encounters between people and spaces that promote that is important. I Don't even know what to add to that. Yes, you're right Both of you talked about participation and community involvement it informs both of your work For architects this may mean engaging with the local residents sound like that happened with both of the projects you worked on that you Showed us tonight and for librarians. This may mean creating tools. You talked about tools In the means to deliver a whole range of services, which I think you're doing now in New York City How does this engaged approach in the form inform the design of our libraries and even our support spaces whether it's the Excuse me the exterior or even What you're working on here in New York with Metro How does it perform the design? I Think I'm answering the question when I say that what I'm most focused on right now is this idea of giving library workers the The the skills the the tools the the power that they need to feel like they can Transform the environment that they work in and and the the way that they interact with the space So I guess I'm thinking about it a little less from the sort of planned design approach almost more from like a Design activist and community activist organizing approach, you know, how do we give them? the ability to Just feel empowered it does that answer the question or am I just going on a tangent? So what does that look like? Is it an open space like you had in fourth floor where it was just you could you had a Loom over in the corner of traditional loom and then you had 3d printers and all of a sudden next week It was another it's an open space, but that's more in this case It's more about creating access to each other creating a special interest groups around topics that are very important to each other And if there is a tool that that is useful Then you know put it in the same area. So there's an attempt at making a collision, right? So you might have everybody organizing around a particular topic But what do you know? there's like a vinyl plotter over there and Because we have that vinyl plotter we can do a much more clean presentation of what it is we're trying to do So it's it's a matter of Organizing and orchestrating the collisions in that way and does your do librarians kind of Tell is it a culture where they tell you this is what they want or is this kind of you know kind of bubble up in In this participatory way, I mean, I think librarians are very outspoken and activist people in general Right, I mean we have librarians in the audience librarians speak up And How did you engage with the communities did you have public meetings like how did you get information? Was it were these two I know with the couple of the projects I looked at closely for For the exhibition the David IJ designed buildings there. They had been 60 Buildings built in the 60s that were torn down were these two Existing buildings that got torn down and then you replaced them with the new architecture. Yeah, actually a little bit worse They were still standing On in both of these and when we started working in these neighborhoods You know the buildings they were they were just boxes literally brick Boxes sitting on the site, you know, very very few windows just Horrible and for some reason the District of Columbia had closed these libraries their entire library and several several neighborhoods And so when we came there, that's why the community was saying just give us a library Because they said we've starving. We're we're anemic. We just want our library back We don't care and the reason why that engagement was critical It started off like you said with community meetings, you know, just a series of community meetings But for us and in our practice, we don't just have a few meetings and go we at those meetings Connections are made and you connect on key issues just like you saw here They're they're basically values and when you build and design in alignment with someone's values Then you come back five years after or a few years after it's open And you see people using these spaces that you created in ways that you didn't even imagine They have it has it takes on a life of its own So it's so fulfilling as designers just to see that and and that's what you want That's why that initial Engagement of communities not just to check something off on a box It's just that it's so that they're vested and that they continue to recreate and re-envision and re-imagine these spaces And I understand in DC the neighborhood libraries were implemented as a catalyst for change I mean this was a pretty big project. They redesigned think 22 some of them were retrofits some of them were new architecture others were co-located But the city focused on new architecture as well as by well-respected architects Phil Freelon David Ajay And others and they Pardon David's brother David Davis Brody Wonderful architects from around the International Arctic architects and this was really important, but they Prioritized disadvantaged neighborhoods and this indicates a shift in institutional projects and planning by focusing on high quality design design excellence, I would say and Before they're even working on the main library, I mean it was like a shift and Was this do you know if this was the first time a major city had made made that kind of Decision to focus on the neighborhoods And do you think this is a trend that's gonna kind of take off across the United States? It really had a lot of Wonderful impact on on these neighborhoods they became these wonderful little hubs in and sometimes struggling neighborhoods That's actually an excellent question, and you're absolutely right. We were and Joe Franchina is here and I Joe he's our works with David as well, so he he could probably attest to this too. We were really pleasantly Pleasantly surprised at the vision that DC had to to prioritize these these libraries And we actually came in and and and helped and we retrofitted some areas of the MLK library last like you said And I think Again, I talked about these tentacles to communities and how the public libraries had been Star Wars in the communities and when they're there like for now like these libraries Probably opened up in 2008 or nine, so they've been there for a while You can see how they've changed those communities. You can see how the children now That have grown up now over these years have grown up in the library And so this notion of that DC had of demanding that people, you know trek in from their neighborhood to downtown They they flipped that on end. Is that a trend? I would say, you know, we're working on some libraries in some communities where it's just the opposite So I wouldn't say at this point that it's a trend. It's just something that was right for that Community of DC at that time. I Can say having worked in probably 40 of the neighborhood libraries across Brooklyn that the branches are where the action is at And if you're really designing for excellent service, it's not about Single destination libraries and a hub and spoke model as much as it's about creating a real networked model of branches, I think that's absolutely the future of great library service is making sure that you're making exceptional facilities All across a distributed kind of network and then We should really just address the fact that one of the very complicated problems that Public libraries and all libraries have is that we don't really take advantage of of scale Nationally or internationally in any meaningful way And that we we have all kinds of networks by which we share best practices and things like that But we really need to start thinking more about, you know, how do the three systems in New York City connect? Meaningfully to what's going on in Chicago and Los Angeles and Chattanooga and everywhere else That's like that is the big design challenge for libraries going forward. Has anybody come up with any, you know propositions that Make sense. Like what would that look like? It's like where to even start, right? You know, I do think that with initiatives like the Digital Public Library of America where we're talking about digital content That there's that there are opportunities there I think that some of the work that is starting to happen at the New York Public Library with an e-book platform That you know it will be available on beyond the New York Public Library in other contexts is really really important But you know, how do we How do we take advantage of Localized expertise, I mean, I'm just gonna I'm gonna do a lot of that. How might we Stuff because I don't necessarily have all of the answers But I think especially when we have a room full of like amazing thinkers from many different disciplines that it's important to surface these questions So that some of the answers can come from the audience as well, that's great And we will open it up to the audience soon And I love how might we we? Bill Mawgridge our former director who was here just for a few years was from IDO and When he arrived his first day, we all had t-shirts on that said how might we and And he's the reason we have this wonderful new kind of transformed Digital Museum, so this is a nod to Bill Mawgridge wherever you are Let me see. I had this is a we talked a little bit earlier in the day not not here at the lecture, but So we're sitting in Andrew Carnegie's former home He left that legacy of building free public libraries across the United States and His were more traditional libraries and your first image was wonderful. It really kind of showed What we all kind of in our minds eye or experience as young children and it really Supports the consumption of information and But here in the these 21st century libraries as you both described they're much more They're supporting the production and sharing of knowledge And from each of your unique perspectives, how do you see libraries continuing to evolve you kind of talked a little bit about This network and do they have a particularly unique role to play right now in our culture? I know the dissemination of knowledge production of knowledge. I don't know is there something Unique and where where do you see they're going? I'm going yeah, you know We all often wish we can see around corners and so what's the next what's the next thing for libraries? But there's so much technology Coming on board, you know, we you know, we see it in libraries. We see it in museums We see how how VR is changing things virtual reality and in a our argument in reality all of these realities are Are changing a lot of the way we experience things and if you think about libraries as places for to cultivate thought and also learning the way people and particularly Generations that are coming up behind me and probably most of us in this room The way people are learning are all that it's all the time. It's the thirst for learning. It's a continuous idea to feed either through your your cell phone that that Wanting instant knowledge or to instantly know all the time. So how do how do libraries? You know help nurture that how do they how do they Compete or nurture in a world where nobody wants to go some place to learn anything or to find out anything They want it now. They want they want it at their fingertips. So I think Libraries will begin to offer a broader way to learn and It I think they could and this is again, it would be a healthy discussion for the audience I think they can begin to marry with other uses. We see that with academic libraries. We do quite a bit of those I know it's a different type of library, but a lot of academic libraries are You know coming together and being Sort of joined with student unions on campuses to help foster You know So all of the uses in a student union in the library are kind of meshing together and you don't really know Which is which but it's just serving the immediate appetite for knowledge and convenience so It'll be interesting to see how how libraries respond to that So I would say it would be those two things the response to to you know, immediate learning and also Technology how that's changing with them with the realities that we're facing augmented and virtual It's not overwhelmingly high-tech, but I think great neighborhood libraries are really accurate reflection of the community that they serve and That I'm going to I'm going to point toward the the opportunity to help a Community sort of curate and preserve itself You know that what when I was working in public libraries I was often very frustrated by the the preservation side of the mission It felt like an add-on because we were working really hard to have The the next thing that people really wanted to have the popular titles that everything and and you know Right now like 92% of public libraries have unique historical holdings I think that in this age it might be flipping over and that there's a really great opportunity for public librarians to be working with the patrons to actually Bring in and preserve their material and tell the story of that community Digitize it make it accessible make it live forever and And it's it's about getting sort of this idea of an archive out of the sepia-toned past and Making the archive something that is happening right now like the archive is happening like three seconds ago, right? How how much can we push that boundary? There are tools now. There's something called doc now doc now.io, which is an amazing project a set of tools that can be used to curate and preserve Twitter feeds and social media in general after some event has happened Because we know that like information just kind of disappears these days, right? And so I think that that You know is a pretty important Role that we're gonna see libraries just like automatically taking on in the coming years So I'm gonna shift a little bit One of my by the people was focused on this intersection of poverty prosperity innovation and design and certainly libraries play a Critical role in that in this 21st century providing this incubation space and learning and access to broadband But in the United States Many find themselves left out of the knowledge in innovation economy This is compounding our growing income inequality and inequities How do you see libraries reaching socially economically diverse set of users to help close that gap? Yeah, that's another good question. You know, I I agree that we're you know, we're all Trending in one direction To the disadvantage of a lot of segments of our community I see libraries helping and bringing the craft back to America of what we used to do You know that there are some thoughts about you know recently that we think about when we look at sort of artists and artists Studios artists in residence studios. Why could they not be in the library? Why why could not the physical craft of Of what we used to do be embraced as well as all of this, you know technology and innovation and thought leadership bring it back in and Allow, you know, you you showed a little bit of that with some of some of your work on the fourth floor where You know open it up, you know Teach people get back get back to creating a little bit more with our hands Couldn't agree more. It's it's so easy to be seduced by the new Technical wizardry and whatnot, right and and that is not necessarily what it's all about. I couldn't agree more The the other thing that we really really have to pay attention to and this gets At rural communities a little bit more but is really focusing on connectivity and Knowing that in many situations that the library might be the only place where you have access to a Wi-Fi in the community And just making sure that on on like the policy side and on all sides We are working hard to to bring connectivity Everywhere for people because that's a that is a divide that is just like terrifying. It really is Do you think the the gig in Chattanooga? I have to say I visited Nate when he was in Chattanooga To see the the work on the fourth floor and I stayed at a hotel I was so excited to go to Chattanooga and try out the gig and They didn't work My god, it was so disappointing But I tried it at the the library, I mean Should we be thinking you know to bring a gig to all of our cities? Is this like yes? Definitely absolutely and then plus plus No doubt about it, and I didn't talk at all about like the Mozilla We worked the Mozilla foundation on a gigabit laboratory a public lab to experiment with the with the gig on the fourth floor And the the interesting things that we were able to do Because of that but I you know Even beyond that sort of lab setting in the library what that was doing For Chattanooga was it was impressive. It really was You know you connectivity is so weird you take it for granted once you have it and then you go somewhere And you don't have it you're like what the And so it just became such a norm there that everything worked except in your hotel I Won't tell you which hotel it was I Think I have one that before we open it up to the the audience and this is kind of a A leadership question both of these places had these incredible Librarians at the head we had Ginny Cooper who She she was a chief librarian in DC, and she had this bold vision to reinvigorate In uplift local communities. She and she was the first librarian to win the Thomas and Thomas Jefferson Award for public architecture Very impressive, and then in Chattanooga you worked with a Librarian of the Year Korean Hill no relation What is do you think that's critical so much you know when we see shifts and great things happening Sometimes there's this leader That's kind of driving this. Do you think that's important too? Oh, yeah, I think that is is absolutely critical I mean when Jenny Cooper Brought in and said I want top design. I'm bringing in Design professionals who who are great who understand the issues who are able to contextualize and express the values of me that that was not just because she wanted People to come in that can design monuments to their own ego She understood to bring us in because we're able to get at the heart of these communities She understood You know what it what it's like that she and we and everybody's gonna gonna walk away and these communities are left to sustain And reinvent the uses of these so I can't underscore enough About about the leadership there and it's it's actually quite rare in my opinion Everything is about people everything is about leaders, but it's also about incredible teams Chattanooga worked because of the amazing people who are working there On beyond like good leadership The the people who were invested in making the fourth floor and everything else about that library of success are the reason that it was Working well So I mean I do think leadership is is incredibly important, but it's also It's about Supporting a whole team of people. It's the only way that that good things happen. I also think I mean increasingly Skeptical of this idea it almost feels like it's an old institutional hierarchical thing that if you Create a good service then everybody can leave but that service lives on and Because you've made it something that is standardized and can stay I think that that's the other thing that comes along with embracing people is that The library's work because of the ecosystems and the relationships that are going on so You know, I guess I'm just getting at the fact that it's all about the humans It's not about the technology or the building by the people else. It is it is it really is a great segue Thank you We're gonna open it up to the audience now. So if you have a Susanna has a mic So the program is titled beyond books But what is the role of books as physical objects in these future libraries because you touched shortly on Preservation, but is everything faded to be scanned and become a digital file or is there a role for these physical objects still? Yeah, I'll start answering that There still is a role for physical books I think the change is not that books are kind of out of the library because this is beyond books Right now in a lot of libraries that we do books Just aren't the thing that that just confront you and slam you in the face the minute you walk in the library It's about people you see people interacting and engaging at multiple levels But the books are still there, but they can be we actually now have sophisticated retrieval systems in libraries where you know you kind of Books are not necessarily as much in sight and you go to these systems And they retrieve the book and you actually have the physical book on demand But it does not have to be on display for miles and miles of shelving It's about seeing the people when you walk into those spaces now Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean I love books and they're not going away But I think that the the quantity of them and the way that you access them is what's really changing. I mean when you Look at any of these large urban library systems And what if you think of them as giant content management systems? What if the books are are the the data and you have a means of moving that stuff around to the different ways That that you can access it right that that The the books are mobile and they're you're not going to have these same kind of like browsing experiences in the stacks I For the most part and I think that I'm saying that you can see my like body language as I'm saying that there's this like There's a yeah, there's a there's a little bit of sadness that That comes along with that for me I'm not gonna lie to you like I liked going to like stores to buy CDs and stuff, too But you know the the world also does kind of go with the direction that the world does so Why does that? creation of a kind of space and interface so one could browse and find something without Planning it ahead of time have to be given up. Why can't the library still allow that to happen? It can right it's a matter of choosing your priorities and designing for whatever your priorities are And there are all different kinds of ways of accomplishing that and you know if if a community is going to come together and say that their priority is to have the that Means of accessing information and that is what's number one to them again a good library is a reflection of that community So that's a decision that can be made It's not the way that I think the world is trending, but it certainly is a decision that can be made because I just Bring that up because I think that that kind of serendipity act of allowing an individual to come in and Without any kind of supervision kind of find their own way is is a means of empowerment and One of the issues that I find difficult and I think is kind of societally difficult now is if there are portals to get to Information, but you don't know how to navigate those portals you're disconnected and There's just that kind of primary act that goes back to the old library of being able to walk in walk around And eventually lay hands on something that starts the process of engagement is very empowering Yeah, I think that's one of your question I think that's one of the reasons why the the community and branch libraries are so important because it's not a one size What's one shoe fits all mentality you can make that you know I looked I've reviewed two libraries where the actual expression and the design of those libraries were a direct result of What the community said they wanted so you know That's the that's the beauty and the flexibility that you have with with being embedded in these communities Totally, and I think a lot of the the sort of Alternative approaches that we've been talking about it's really about engaging new and different audiences as well I mean I always think that you know if If I had tried to take everybody who had been like Always checking out romance novels at the chat new go public library and said we're done with those It's 3d printing time. They wouldn't like you're crazy, and I would have gotten fired So it's a it's a matter of tailoring some of these services to to different audiences as well and without alienating anyone So I've heard you talking about I've often heard this idea of a third place applied to libraries Actually, I think it was first applied to English coffee houses where people got together and they got together to talk about politics And so I look briefly on the chat new the website I did see there's something called the open brigade in which there was connections to the municipal government But I haven't heard you talk about the politics that Libraries are capable of reaching out to politics Organized politics of some sort. I mean I can speak specifically to what you're referencing there in that We tried to and and libraries do this all over the place is that this is a neutral civic space, right? Where discourse and discussion can happen? and and we regularly held events like the the brigade was the sort of the the group of activists that were actually Fighting to open up different data sets and then do things with them. And so we regularly held events It bringing them together with others. We also There regularly had sort of public forums around different topics is that is are you asking about? Sort of that neutral platform Component or are you asking about the you know on the one hand? Libraries sort of react to what the community wants But if they simply wait for them people to come in there's no direction So I guess I'm asking how much can the library sort of move things in a particular way And I sounded like a Chattanooga that was done Yeah, I mean you You have to there is a certain level of expertise that comes with being a librarian for a while, right? You work in these settings and You you start to look at the world I mean, I certainly am constantly looking at you know Library journal and every other publication out there to see what's going on across the country and across the world And how what kinds of services are people developing for communities? And so you do have to sometimes lead It's not always reactive, right? If you always were reactive. Yeah, you're right. You'd totally never get anywhere Sometimes you have to present something new and sort of try to bring people along and If you're failing, you know it because people don't show up, right? It and so it's okay to get ahead of the curve for a little while as long as you're It's sort of the design thinking cycle, right? The that you prototype things you try things and then you evaluate and then you decide If you're going to iterate and how you're going to iterate I Think to your point to one of the things that support that is going back to what you said earlier about Flexibility, you know and designing with extreme it takes some it takes some a lot of courage To to really go out on a limb and first of all admit that you don't necessarily know everything You're going to lead the best way you can but part of that leadership is is building in on Flexibility casters and lights and something else you said earlier Yeah, I'm curious about the legal structure of libraries and you know How are they set up as you look across the different places where you've worked within them? How are they set up and for example if you end end up with a Library that you're bringing forth in the way that you've described so well I mean if you have someone who says nope I can't do that. I've got to check the Dewey decimal system or they say kids quiet. It's the library You know, how do you how do you have the ability to? either ask from long-standing librarians that they change or To change out the set of librarians if it's needed It's like a few questions mashed up in one I'll just say that And again, we're talking about public libraries that they're organized in many different ways And that is one of the things that sort of complex as you look out across the country There are municipal libraries. There are school district libraries There's a lot of different ways that communities have come together and and chosen to have a library So there's no one-size-fits-all answer to that The other part was about I Don't know. What was it? I think the question is more like, you know, is it more along the lines of policing behavior sort of You're talking about people who work at those libraries Well, yeah, and and we should it's important to say that libraries need quiet places, right? So I've talked a lot about the loud and collaborative places and such and the first thing that you learn when you have a big loud Collaborative places that you needed a quiet place, right? So like no question there You know change management with any organization There's I mean, there's so much written about this But you always you can divide people into five right and you're gonna have at the far end You're gonna have people who are automatically on board with whatever is next and they're like going with it And then you're gonna have the people all the way at the other end of the spectrum who are absolutely not going to go with it But you focus on the three pieces in the middle because the people who are coming along with you anyways You don't need to pay attention and then there's some people that you might need to ignore That's been my strategy. I'm not gonna make like I'm totally right It's very it's very difficult to transition organizations from one thing to another But but there's continuity and I hope that the things that were we're talking about here aren't like so radically different You're like that's not even a library. No I mean like you can you can make logical connections between what's been done and where we need to go I Think one example of that is that do you recall if we take it out of the library? Sector for a minute just as an analogy. Do you recall when people first, you know in the in the office culture moved from Workstations to the open or from private offices to the open workstation environment That was like everybody was clutching their pearls thinking how is how is this gonna work? Does it mean that somebody's gonna be running around going shh, you know all day and and and people They they sort of adapt and modify their behavior to their environment only though once they have initial buy-in and Education about what you're trying to do and are sold to that to that mission. So I Just also wanted to address a number of questions that are also coming out of the audience You know if you have questions about your local library you could go to your staff If you have questions about the organization and about how we operate and how your tax dollars are going to it and being operated Please ask us. We would be so happy if you do and If if you're I'm with the New York Public Library a Couple of us here are here from the Mid Manhattan library, which is undergoing a renovation So if you want to see it in this current iteration, please stop by it'll be gone by the end of the year We're what where's the intersect where is it for one of 40 second 40th and 5th What are you so not the one with the Lions the one right across that was a department store in the 1970s and For for audience members who may be unaware about these beautiful changes that that happened in Chattanooga and the beautiful changes That happened DC which has the most awesome digital memory lab Where people can go ahead and transition their VHS to digital format, you know In Miami, we have our UMedia in Chicago. We have our UMedia in Broward County library We have our creation station if you were really curious You could go to our conferences as well that do welcome people that are other than libraries other than librarians And there are libraries in Miami and in Broward and I'm not sure by here in New York yet Can you tell I'm from South Florida? That literally they have the book shelves on wheels and on a 25,000 square foot building We were like, okay, let's just shove everything in the auditorium and have an entire open floor of program for the day for a festival Which is very centered around children and community So again, so there are these transformative things that are happening And I guess my question other than preaching right is about Nate you spoke about not just a strong leadership, but a strong team and I guess it's it's for The question is how do you continue to encourage your staff members in your team to really Understand that you may not have the answers and to go along with you When you may not have all of them, that's a great question Which I continue to struggle with right? I mean, I'm trying to Re-invigorate and change another organization in many ways right now and and I Don't I definitely don't always have the answers I usually run into the answers by accident along the way by like trying a bunch of stuff Which makes people crazy right So I think that there's a certain amount of just Transparency and openness and kindness that you really have to show You know, it's it's just essential to Address everyone that you work with with respect and And I feel like people are pretty forgiving and come along with you As long as you As long as you do the same in return for them I this is not necessarily like a library answer, right? This is a this is just like a how can you be a decent person in this world? It's and it's really important to do so. I hope that's helpful I think we're on I was just gonna say we have time for one quick more one more question While you're searching for that person that wants to ask that last question I think what you described is kind of what design does it's this iterative process and that's why We included a lot of in the exhibition. We included Well-known designers along with people who are not trained as designers But are acting as designers and I think certainly Chattanooga was one great example of that Hi, could you talk about the funding for the Projects that you did Okay, so the the projects that I did the funding was through the through DC it was publicly funded so Yeah, that's I'm not quite sure how you know of all the intricacies with that other than that. They were a hundred percent publicly funded I'll say one other thing to tack on about leadership to a good leader Recognizes and acknowledges that they don't have all the answers and and allow people to understand it They're part of the solution to finding the answer So you have to empower your team to work with you, but that starts with admitting the fact that you don't know Oh that put me as well the The beauty of what was going on and the fourth floor is it almost it cost very very little money like that's sort of the The the the pattern of transformation there is that we would Only make a very small investment watch usage if people liked the thing you get more of the thing And if they didn't then you don't And I think it's a really important way to to operate I mean we I Mean sure we made mistakes as well I'm trying to think of a really expensive mistake, and I don't think that there was a really expensive one It's that fail fail fast fail cheap thing that people say Yeah, that's that's kind of all there is to it. We just kind of scrapped it together Well, thank you both Zina and Nate it was a Extremely stimulating conversation