I’m in a YA Library-services focused class now (basically it’s a lot less “Teens like vampires!” and a lot more “Jesus fucking christ how did we get to the point where it is so socially ingrained in us to treat teenagers like shit”) and we’re on this module on teen space design in libraries and it’s like “Well, by including teenagers in the design process, we found that when it comes to spatial design, teenagers like lots of natural light, green and sustainable building praxis, clean, casual, and comfortable atmospheres, interesting and appealing colors, and also absolutely bullshit furniture that even they have no idea how to sit on.”
So it’s like…
“Tell me… what do The Youths™ want?”
“We still don’t know, but they seem to respond well to victorian fainting couches remodeled to look like they came out of that one time in the early 2000′s where our idea of futuristic was making everything look like it was made out of jell-o.”
Like in this one library, they introduced this piece of furniture that was referred to as “the disk” or “The round thing” and it was just this kind of… solid, padded squat cylinder, not a table because it was padded, too big and connected to the floor to be an ottoman, and not a couch because it was… a cylinder. And like, at first the teens didn’t use it because they thought it was reserved as like, a cushy stage for like, storytimes or something, but as soon as they realized they could sit or lay down on it and it was for them, you would have friend groups of teens literally piling on each other on it. Like that’s honestly the cutest shit.
How to build a teenarium
