The future of reading and libraries is the topic of an exhibition in Studenthuset at Campus Valla starting on 6 November. Based on ideas generated in a series of workshops, the exhibition includes stories in various genres and formats.
The Thing from the Future
During the spring of 2025, five workshops were held with library management and personnel, students and preschool children (in a collaboration with the public library in Mantorp in East Sweden).
The workshops were based on the game The Thing from the Future, as adapted by PhD student Cornelia Linderoth at Linköping University’s Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning.
The Thing from the Future is a game that challenges the players both individually and collectively with the purpose to generate entertaining and thought-provoking hypothetical scenarios. In our version of the game, a series of prompts are created based on four cards: Context, Development, Object and Feeling. The context remains the same throughout the game: the library as place and concept. A simplified version was created for the two workshops held with preschool children.
The ideas and scenarios that were generated during our workshops were then collected and converted into a series of texts with the help of the generative AI tool Copilot. The texts are written in various genres: poems, a play, a short story, a comic book and two fairy tales. Several of the stories are available in alternative formats such as text/illustrated, text/audio and text/video.
Visiting professor in the name of Tage Danielsson, Athena Farrokhzad, also contributed to the exhibition with a poem based on material from the workshops.
Bibliomancer
Bibliomancer is a cyberpunk-inspired short story that is based on material from the workshop with library personnel, and that was also developed into a comic book. The story takes place in a future after a catastrophic event called the “Blackout.” What role would libraries play in such a society? How will people retrieve and use information in a future where the boundaries between humans and machines are blurred?
Panels from the comic book Bibliomancer. Illustrations by Ulf Lindgren
An English version of the story is available in the Bibliomancer comic book, openly accessible online: Bibliomancer
Fairy tales
One of the fairy tales that was created based on the workshops with preschool children is called The Fairy Tale Book That Could Do Anything. Here is an excerpt from the tale:
The children love their library because it holds books on every topic you could imagine: from flying cats to the Titanic. Sometimes, the books are sad, sometimes magical and provided with wings that can lift you into the air. But beware of Godzilla, who is sneaking around the library and devours books! At the library, you can learn, dream, and travel to new worlds via books. There are books with all kinds of adventures – even slightly weird ones.
The exhibition on the third floor in Studenthuset, Campus Valla. Photo: Peter Igelström
Bibliotopia is on display in Studenthuset until 30 January, 2026.
