Introduction

As pedagogy has moved away from knowledge transmission through lectures to more independent forms of learning and group work, recognition of the importance of social and informal learning spaces on campuses has risen (Bennett, 2009; Cox and Benson Marshall, 2021). Students need places to study, and often their residential accommodation is not well designed to support this. Acknowledging the importance of physical spaces is also to recognise the physical and emotional dimensions of learning (Cox, 2017). While digital might have been thought to reduce the importance of space, in fact we know that the digital has a strong material dimension (Gourlay and Oliver, 2018). Devices are physical objects that need to be carried, handled and charged, and their role in learning is shaped by the physical and social contexts of their use. And while digital has reduced the need for libraries to be warehouses for books, it has opened up the potential for libraries to offer multiple types of space to support different forms of learning. Librarians have demonstrated growing wisdom about how to design library spaces that enable learning. This has given them a potentially influential role in reconceptualising university space as a whole. How libraries have been redesigned provides a model for reconfiguring the whole estate to be much more about supporting different types of learning, rather than seeing the lecture theatre as the only place where learning happens or focusing on the material environment and not on the feel of spaces.