In the post-industrial city, storage is not physical and immobile. The increasing digital storage flows, such as data, knowledge, and information, play a vital role in determining the physical parameters in cities. Ideas, as the collective term for knowledge and information, can be stored in the digital medium. This paper addresses the topic of storage of ideas as the collective form of knowledge and information. The development of digital and dynamic storage generates new typologies, while challenging other existing typologies to transform their scope and services. In particular, the public library, traditionally devoted to storing ideas in the form of passive knowledge, is now confronted with a completely new way of producing knowledge available to people.

The personal contribution is to conceptualize a future library as a modern panopticon, particularly, the visibility in panopticon as the metaphor of efficient knowledge sharing creation activities. To achieve this, the research question is “How to translate the concept of storage of ideas into a collective building of knowledge and information?”

The answers to the research questions are derived from the relevant building typologies research, which includes cultural institutions: libraries,community centres; storage facilities: datacenter, distribution center; disciplinary institutions: panopticon.

South of Rotterdam as the testbed offers the challenges and opportunities for the project of storage of ideas. A future library’s specific design brief is constructed by analyzing three aspects, including the creative city strategy, the lack of cultural institutions, and the existing bottom-up creative industries.