Reimaging Our Spaces

As noted in last week’s post announcing the agenda for CMEpalooza Fall, I spent last week on vacation with my family. We were in and around Boston for the better part of 6 days. Boston would be one of my favorite cities in the United States were it not for their arrogant, haughty sports fans (“And over here we have one of our 452 championship trophies. Oh wait, I forgot, it’s 453. One of our teams won again last night.”).

But seriously, Boston is a great city – immensely walkable, appropriately historic, and quite clean (at least in and around downtown where we spent most of our time). I’ve been there many times over the years for personal and work purposes, but this was my first extended time as a tourist.

As I’ve written about in previous years, one of my favorite things to do when I am on vacation is to spend time in that city’s main public library branch (you don’t have to scream, “NERD!!” I get it). Like some of you, I grew up in an era where libraries meant one and only one thing – books. Maybe there were a few tables and chairs strewn about, but libraries of the 1980s generally weren’t considered places to linger around in comfort. It would probably take you 20 minutes to find the book you wanted after digging through the card catalog and book stacks (and don’t get me started if you needed to dig through microfiche for research purposes), but once you got your books, you would check them out and bring them home. Maybe there were one or two beanbag chairs, but that was about the extent of it.

And so frankly, it amazes me every time I visit a big city library to see how they have reimagined their spaces in recent decades. In Boston, I walked into the entrance and just about bumped into Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was being interviewed live in the NPR studio tucked into one of the corners of the library. Further on, there was a 6-piece band playing in the courtyard entertaining those who were eating lunch. Then there was the dainty restaurant that served a massive afternoon tea each day ($65 a person for lots of fancy finger foods, tea sandwiches, and the like – I didn’t partake). Upstairs was the “special collection” area where you could have actual librarians in white gloves (OK, they were cheap, latex blue gloves) very excitedly showing off the various documents they had curated for the month’s theme of “Magic in the Early 1900s.” My son quite enjoyed the “teen center” where they had video games galore you could play for as long as you wanted.

Now don’t get me wrong – I loved the boring old libraries as a kid too. Not all of us are as bourgeoisie as Derek and can afford to shell out $35 in a bookstore every time we want to read something new. The fact that I can simply walk into my library, grab any stack of books I want, and not even have to worry about overdue fines anymore still amazes me.

But to see how libraries have evolved into spaces that truly serve their community got me thinking — why aren’t we doing more of this in medical education? Why aren’t we reimagining how we use our educational spaces to better serve our audience of learners? While there is nothing wrong with the “tried and true” dais of speakers and slide decks, are there innovations we can all consistently build into the live education model to transform them into more efficient learning spaces? I’m not talking about throwing away the core tenets of what we do, but how do we build upon our past to create a more engaging future?

We talk about these sorts of things often during CMEpalooza, and we try to inject new ideas of our own into many of our sessions, but there are probably things we could do better as well. Creativity isn’t always easy when you’ve been doing something well for many years (and yes, I know we may also need to convince funders to, you know, put dollars behind some of our wackier ideas). But I figure that if something as staid as the public library can break from its traditional model, so can we.