---
post_type: "project"
title: "Autonomous Libraries"
blurb: "An R&D project that redesigned the library as a small, distributed network of spaces where physical books carry their digital context with them."
chapter: "HCI Research · Suslib · 2018–2020"
org: suslib
year:
    - 2020
tags:
    - R&D
    - future-of-knowledge
    - smart-city
    - IoT
stack:
    - Word2Vec
    - Elasticsearch
    - OCR
    - CV
    - NLP
    - OpenPose
    - YOLOv3
    - LSTMs
    - TensorFlow
    - AR interfaces
    - modular architecture
    - HCI
link: "https://suslib.com/research/autonomous-libraries"
---

Autonomous Libraries was an R&D project that asked what a library would look like if we designed it from scratch for how knowledge is produced now. Instead of one central building, we imagined a small, distributed network of modular, community-run spaces spread across everyday places — a coffeehouse, a square, a train station. It pulled together the technologies we had built at Suslib: Knowledge Recognition for semantic search and contextual linking, Intention Recognition for gesture- and object-based interaction, and light AR to tie physical and digital resources together. You could pick up a book and see its digital context, annotate a page, then carry on reading on your own device after you left.

I led the engineering direction, making sure our APIs and ML systems could work inside a hybrid physical-digital space, while Martijn handled interaction design and Studio Helioripple the modular architecture. It was design research as much as a prototype, and never meant to be a single app. Most of my work since has been the same question in a different form: how we interact with knowledge, and how to make software hold the context around it instead of leaving that to the person.

`with` [Martijn de Heer](https://suslib.com) (co-founder, designer), [Studio Helioripple](https://suslib.com) (Amin Bahrami)