A workable solution to information overload, or simply insane? Information Aesthetics tells us about a novel approach to categorizing and classifying books in a large collection, based on a very imaginative book sleeve and an index based on a gradient of colours.

As a person who is genetically predisposed to wander in the stacks of libraries and bookstores, pulling books and pamphlets from shelves in a quest for something novel, informative or simply startling, I can sympathize with the desire for a more orderly and intuitive classification system.

Unfortunately, this classification system presents a fundamental conflict: it attempts to provide a simple visual cue to a very complex problem.

Let’s remember, there are still two camps of book classification: the Dewey die hards versus the Library of Congress obsessives.

And each breaks the classification problem down into a complex combination of letters and numbers.

The designer’s goal (explanation here) seems to have been to free the details of classification from the confined space of the shelf and the poor design of the contemporary library sticker:

“Notice that the book’s cover loses it’s importance in the library, it is squashed between this book and that book. Not to be confused with a book store, this is a well organized storage space. It is the spine that one look’s for and it is the call number label that allows one to find. With so much pressure on the call number label, I found it to be tiny and inconsistent, appearing to be slapped on carelessly.

Now imagine a wall of books, it appears to be quite disorganized in terms of the book’s information, a mismach a textures, typefaces and colours. The information inevitably gets lost within itself. I Initially wanted to cover the books individually with a standard removable sleeve that I would design displaying all of the book’s information in a clean, efficient and legible manner; however, it took about 30 seconds in the encyclopedia section to feel how boring and unbearable this solution would make one’s library experience.

The trickiest part was realizing that having the same template for every book did not ease one’s book search, but rather cause the book to completely to disappear within the others, making it impossible to see or stand out. All signs of curiosity vanish.”

An appealing design concept, but one that raises the colour of the sleeve above all the other qualities of the book:

• the age of the binding
• the texture of the title on the spine
• the style of binding
• the book size
• the juxtaposition of similarly bound books (perhaps in a series, or by the same publisher)

With this system, design overpowers the atmosphere and idiosyncracy of the library: the sense of exploration and possibility for chance discovery is replaced by a dominating colour scheme and an eagerness to impose consistency and conformity. Fashion over content, acceptable behaviour over eccentricity.

Isn’t that what we have librarians for?