Now, let’s have a look at the before mentioned learning-clusters. Each of them consists out of different types of furniture sets to facilitate various usages. But a cluster’s functionality is fluid: users can oscillate between the functions according to their temporary needs. Couches and armchairs in blue offer an informal, casual experience. The red table grouping is more reminiscent of conventional workstations for individual activities. Curtains can be used to create temporary zoning. And then there are the pink furniture sets, which we will look at in detail now.

In the graphic above, besides a group of student users and conventional furniture like tables and chairs, it stands out that there are a lot of displays: a large screen for shared content and video conferencing, laptops, and tablets. But next to the digital devices there are books and paper-based notepads, too. Multimedia working units, like this exemplary one, are the core element of the Ideathek. Here, the projects initiated by the students take place. And here all the available knowledge carriers come together: digital, analog, human. Parallel to the dynamic and self-organized modulation on the interface level, the students will find in the Ideathek a flexible and interactive space that can be correspondingly occupied and individually adapted in situ. The design attempts to implement a new mode of collaborative knowledge prosumption (simultaneous consumption and production) based on the principles of networked technology compiling the notions of flexibility, interaction, transdisciplinarity and nonlinearity. It is the final spatial fold which extends the algorithmically generated, virtual space, via the mediation of the search-interface to material reality. In doing so, it recreates the situational configurations, passing on the complexity inherent in the high-dimensional system of the universities. Within those socio-epistemic situations knowledge is brought into circulation and communication to produce a condensed, lateral milieu for the generation of creativity and new ideas.

Instead of an overdetermined spatial configuration, the users are empowered to shape the space themselves through interaction on all spatial levels. From the interface to the actual building – by uploading their work on the database or by creating spontaneous, flexible working environments in virtual or real-world space: they become knowledge and space creating agents themselves. With this in mind, we finally break away from the ideal of a functionally pre-planned and well-structured library. The Ideathek building itself could be understood as a kind of collective interface. In the sum of the activities taking place in it, it forms an unpredictable, ecological system approximating the stored complexity of the epistemic system of TU and UdK.