design catalyst ci lab notes

FOR UTS:CI LABS@malbooth July, 2012

Design as Catalyst at UTS Library

UTS:LIBRARY

Library Challenges1. Rapidly changing information environment

2. Becoming more proactive (we are too passive)

3. Staying relevant & engaging with contemporary culture

4. Educating & preparing new librarians

Design as Catalyst

UTS Library Challenges1. Implement & exploit ASRS & RFID technology

2. Consolidate two campus libraries in the city

3. Plan a future library with relevant services

Design as Catalyst

LIBRARY RETRIEVAL SYSTEMUnderground

LEARNING COMMONSRelocated & upgraded UTS Library

IMAGE: UTS Campus Master Plan

Design as Catalyst

The Library Retrieval System hole being dug (right now - July 2012).

A big idea (inspiration)

Design as Catalyst

We face many changes and challenges as we approach a big new future library space and new technologies over the next five years. So, we’ve mapped out our approach to all of this in advance.

UTS: Library Vision

Connecting people, knowledge & culture at the heart of the campus

Design as Catalyst

UTS Library: Towards 2017 & Beyond

Culture Knowledge Collaboration

Design as Catalyst

UTS : Library2017+

Culture


Providing Inspiration

Adding Context to the Knowledge

Recognising UTS Achievements

Design as Catalyst

Culture is both critical and pivotal to our future. It helps to distinguish us from online services and from a world in which libraries have become buildings for books. As well as proving inspiration, meaning and context for knowledge, it helps us connect people to knowledge and to connect people within our community.

UTS : Library2017+

Knowledge

New Service Model

Exciting Curiosity

Discovery

New Technology

UTS Library: Towards 2017 & BeyondDesign as Catalyst

Our efforts with discovery must drive curiosity about our collections and our services. The new technologies we are employing like RFID and ASRS will lead to the design and development of a new service model for our library. That is already starting with research in 2012 into how our users behave and what they need from us.

UTS : Library2017+

Knowledge

http://youtu.be/dhYIOE7gERA

UTS Library: Towards 2017 & BeyondDesign as Catalyst

Please watch the video. It only lasts just over a minute.



UTS : Library2017+

Collaboration

Spaces for Interaction

Connections

Neutral SpaceInter-disciplinarity

UTS Library: Towards 2017 & BeyondDesign as CatalystDesign as Catalyst

Collaboration can be enhanced by spatial and furniture design, but we must also be more active in connecting our users to encourage collaboration and in going beyond just providing access to a neutral space that isn’t owned by a particular faculty or school within the University. Interactivity between faculties must be encouraged by the provision of spaces and services in the Library that facilitate those connections.

EthosSustainable

Socially responsible

& Innovative

Methods(Co) Design

Engagement

ToolsPeople

Collections

Technology

New Building(s)

UTS Library 2017 +

HOW

This is our how slide. We are only starting this journey, so it is early days yet and we expect some things to change and evolve as we progress.

Collaboration

Knowledge

Culture


Right Now2012 Envisioned Library

2017

2012 2017

Design as Catalyst

What we hope for by 2017 is the development of a broader impact across the collaboration-knowledge-culture spectrum than we have right now in 2012.

Three Design Challenges

1. Designing the New Library Spaces

2. Designing a New Service Model

3. Designing a New Organisation to Move into the New Space & Deliver the New Service Model.

Design as Catalyst

Section 01

UTS Library 2017 >

Timeline

2012 2013 2014 2015

PRESENT

Design as Catalyst

REDEVELOP DISCOVERY SERVICES

RFID PHASE 2

MERGE BLAKE & KG LIBRARY

2012 2013 2014 2015

PRESENT

Design as Catalyst

LRS EXCAVATION LRS BUILD LRS INSTALLATION & LOAD


RFID PHASE 2


2012 2013 2014 2015

PRESENT

Design as Catalyst

SPECIAL COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

ARTIST–IN–RESIDENCE PROGRAM



RFID PHASE 2


2012 2013 2014 2015

PRESENT

Design as Catalyst


RFID PHASE 2



SPECIAL COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

ARTIST–IN–RESIDENCE PROGRAM

DEVELOP NEW SERVICE MODEL

CO-DESIGN SPATIAL BRIEF FOR NEW LIBRARY

REDEVELOPMENT OF BLAKE LIBRARY SPACES

2012 2013 2014 2015

PRESENT

Design as Catalyst

Collaborative Creativity (1)

Design as Catalyst

First, some history dating back well before we started talking about considered design or design thinking. Before we even knew what our challenges would pan out to be ...

We started involving staff in our planning some years ago. To liven it up and to encourage broader and more meaningful engagement by all staff who could attend (it was never compulsory), we made the sessions more playful as workshops facilitated by junior professional staff over two half days. People were encouraged to build prototypes of their ideas and asked to explain them to all. We Tweeted the sessions for all to see live on Twitter. (You can see a live tweet-stream in the image on the right from early 2010. That was way before #QANDA did it.)A collaboratively creative environment had been created through play and all levels of staff participated in the small teams together.This was later written up in a scholarly journal artical by Dr Suzanna Sukovic with David Litting and Ashley England.

We were practicing some of the methods of co-design and participatory design in a process that was very similar to a design thinking workshop without even knowing what those things were.

Collaborative Creativity (2)

Design as Catalyst

We had a strong record of working with current and future stakeholders to try and gain a sense of what they wanted or imagined for our future and their future library. Here is pictured a workshop of junior high school students who will become our future undergrads. They gave very insightful descriptions of what they thought was important for our future library.

Greenery & Water Media Spaces Obvious Sustainability

Art & Randomness Intuitive Tech Meaningful signage Thematic Identity

Design as Catalyst

Atriums & Curves

These points are what the year 7 & 9 students told us they wanted in a university library of the future after a half day informal workshop in our current library in September of 2010.Some of the things they told us:Extended learning - the opportunity to learn beyond the set curriculum (i.e. art & culture should be prominent in a library).What can we do to provide randomness in our libraries? Everything we do is about (mostly outdated ontologies and structures!).Gaming & media spaces are probably essential now. A library without them in the future will be irrelevant.Orientation spaces have a significant effect, more significant than any signage, on the behaviour of those entering. It is expected by our clients.Water features, greenery and natural light are probably things we would wish to see ourselves.Future students will expect all technology that we provide to be intuitive. If it isn’t it won’t be used.Signage can be over-done, and to be effective it must be meaningful.Our future students expect like-books to have some kind of thematic identity that gives users/readers a clue about their content.I didn’t really understand why students said they liked the curved spaces in the UTS Library until I saw those of the Philological Library in Berlin’s Free University.Library spaces and services must learn to be customisable and personalised. Maybe we are too precious about those spaces and don’t understand their true potential.We want our future library to be a social hub, but it also must provide exposure to culture, so the use of art within the library will be critical.Our sustainability initiatives must be visible and demonstrate our progress (or not) in all dimensions/facets.Comfy chairs are essential because patrons simply will not spend every hour in a library awake.“Lack of rules” perhaps indicates that we still have too many rules, or too many signs indicating the rules. Perhaps there are other ways to influence and encourage behaviour besides rules?

Design Catalyst #1

@pennyhagen

Dr Penny HagenPDC 2010#GlebeCM

Design as Catalyst

So, at some stage in 2010, I ran into Penny Hagen who was then completing her PhD at UTS. She skilfully explained that what we were trying to do actually had a name as a design discipline or practice - codesign or participatory design or user-centred design.Penny connected me to the design community of Sydney via weekly morning coffee meet-ups in Glebe - #GlebeCM. It seems that Penny knew people engaged in design thinking and UX and UI design from all over Sydney. A met a dynamic, open, friendly and intelligent network of people from several design firms (Digital Eskimo, Meld, Zumio, Neotony, etc.), independent designers, UI/UX people (from the ABC and Atlassian) and many others and got to know them all pretty well over more than a year. I met even more people via #DesignThinkingDrinks.Penny also encouraged me to attend PDC 2010 at UTS: the first ever Participatory Design Conference held in the Southern Hemisphere, which she helped organise. See the blog post http://www.frommelbin.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/participatory-service-design.html and several subsequent posts from PDC that month.

Penny is a very skilled and energetic connector, facilitator, thinker, teacher and organiser. Unfortunately, she went home to NZ after completing her PhD. I am ever grateful to her for introducing me to so many people who have become friends, colleagues and design mentors for us at work. Her energy, enthusiasm, ideas and her network are all missed in Sydney, but we stay in touch via Twitter and email. And now she is assisting a colleague and friend at the Auckland University of Technology Library.

I cannot over-estimate the pivotal importance of meeting Penny as a critical point on our design journey.

Design Catalyst #2

Maps of Sydney by Dr Kate Sweetapple

DAB Visual CommsDesigning Out CrimeDAB LAB

Design as Catalyst

Around the same time opportunities presented themselves for several of us engaged with planning our future library to work with academic staff and students who were doing some really cool projects on augmented reality, designing out crime, incidental data, etc. We’d already begun a strong relationship via the curator of our DAB LAB Research Gallery to identify and borrow student design work for display in our library. This led to informal meetings with several key Visual Communications academic staff and researchers and thew acquisition of several of their creative works, like the playful data maps of Sydney shown above that map people with avian, constellation and fish surnames against their addresses pulled from the Sydney White Pages database. This new development of special collections was and is a key plank in the development of our future library.The relationship also led to cooperation with those academics and also staff from Industrial Design to identify and select key work from their graduate student exhibitions for acquisition by the library for its special collection.Finally, this relationship, encouraged by informal meetings in cafes and with advice from curators of significant private art collections, led to the 2012 Artist-in-Residence program and the hiring of a 2011 UTS Visual Communications graduate as our resident designer. More from them later ...

Design Catalyst #3U.lab

BikeTank 2011

Design as Catalyst

In 2011 U.Lab was begun as a joint venture by UTS academics from the faculties of: Business; Design, Architecture and the Built Environment; and Engineering & IT. One of their first programs was BikeTank and several library staff participated enthusiastically over the 10 week program. I think this ongoing and strong commitment clearly signalled our intent to learn more about the design thinking process and collaborative design by a diverse community of people.We formed a strong relationship with the u.labbers and they were engaged to facilitate our 2012 library planning days as full design thinking labs.

UTS: Library

Some Design Initiatives 2010+

Design as Catalyst

So, learning from some of the catalysts above gave us ideas and creative ethusiasm to try some new things over the last few years ...

LRS Design Team

HASSELL Studio

Design as Catalyst

This image shows most of the design team for our underground Library Retrieval System (to use ASRS technology from the US) at a weekly meeting held in Hassell Studio (the architects). I attended all of those meetings as the client and also as the resident “expert” on ASRS in libraries. Initially I think some found it odd that the client wanted to be so involved, but I felt we needed to understand all we could about this design project and also that we should contribute to it. It was, I think, a mutually beneficial initiative.

Design Mentors

Sustainability

Discovery (UX)

Planning

Service Design

Design as Catalyst

Since then, we have tried several different design mentorships (for want of a better expression):1. To understand both design thinking and being more sustainable at work, we asked Grant Young from Zumio to lead a team of our supervisors and team leaders (the level beneath our layer of department managers) in a project to get all staff involved in some meaningful sustainability initiatives. This project went in a very different direction to what I had in mind, but the initiatives they came up with were successful, my ideas proved to be not be required and most participants learnt much from the process itself.2. We began a serious two-phased approach towards improving our collection discovery services and online interfaces in 2011. As a first element of this we embarked on some ethnographic research to better understand our clients and that was led by Digital Eskimo professionals. This was our first real attempt at professional UX research on a significant scale and it also proved to be a valuable first step for this project.3. As I mentioned before, this year (2012) we used u.lab to facilitate our two half-day planning sessions. They helped us plan out the activities and goals for each day and encouraged us to invite some external guest speakers to inspire us for each day. Both were brilliant: Steve Baty from Meld on Day #1; and Alison Heller from Urban Affect on Day #2.4. As you will recall from earlier slides, we have three design challenges: spatial, service and organisational design. This year we wanted to make inroads with service design and for that we engaged the assistance of Meld Studios as our latest design mentor. It is just kicking off but already we’ve planned our approach together and several staff have attended a half day workshop at Meld to understand the research and data collection process. I hope that Meld will also be able to deliver an introductory workshop for all of our managers on service design soon.

Special Collections Design as Catalyst

Developing a proper special collection for UTS Library had several objectives:. reintroducing staff to the full curatorial process;. developing a range of design-themed special collections that inspire our clients and provide more context for their knowledge;. developing a better understanding of the creative process involved in the production of such works;. providing a new service that helps us to connect and engage with our community (because it largely comes from them); and . learning more about design ourselves at a time when our challenges all lie in that area.

A New Visual Identity ?

A COLLABORATION WITH CHRIS GAUL & TOM FETHERS

Design as Catalyst

This is an animated presentation that is best seen in presentation mode. Chris is our first Artist in Residence & Tom is our in-house designer.Together they facilitated a process to deliver a much-needed new visual identity for the library that assists us present an engaging call for collaboration in the design of the future library as a cohesive set of visually stimulating images.After that there is an example of Chris’ work from his residency - some playful experimentation with Discovery from a non-librarian’s perspective.

Design as Catalyst

UTS:LIBRARY

Design as Catalyst

Design as Catalyst

LEVEL

200sPSYCHOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY

300sSOCIAL SCIENCES

LEARNING COMMONS SPECIAL NEEDS ROOM

Design as Catalyst

Design as Catalyst

AXISISSUE 05 / 2012

> Open Reserve Upgrade

> Insiders Guide To Getting Published

> Pat Corrigan Bookplate Collection

UTS :

LIBRARY

Design as Catalyst

Design as Catalyst

NEW

TYPOGRAPHY

MAKE

HAMLET

SEMESTER EXAM

BRITNEY

TAKE

OLD

GEOGRAPHY

UTS:LIBRARY2013

–LIBRARY HANDBOOK

Design as Catalyst

As our first Artist in Residence, Chris has helped us to understand beyond what we know, he has given us fresh new perspectives on our challenges and presented us with stimulating original ideas.

As we prepare to store almost 80% of our physical collection in an underground automated retrieval system, the nature of online interfaces for exploring the collection and browsing books becomes even more relevant.Rather than being sterile and uninspiring, these interfaces can be creative, unexpected tools that encourage playful exploration and serendipitous discovery. What follows is one of Chris’ concepts that challenge our current understanding of the ways we search for and find items in vast library collections. He has other concepts that ask if we could allow users to wander the shelves wearing headphones and listening to the babble of books reading themselves aloud. What if our users could tune into different frequencies of the books, or use their Dewey call numbers to call them on phones?You can see more of Shelf Life here (with links for further reading) http://www.flickr.com/photos/malbooth/sets/72157631383600686/

Design as Catalyst

Artist-in-Residence

Library Collection

000 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900

924,903 Items

CHRIS GAUL

Design as Catalyst

Artist-in-Residence

Languages

400 410 420 430 440 450 460 470 480 490

12,043 Items

CHRIS GAUL

Design as Catalyst

Artist-in-Residence

Linguistics 1,918 Items

415410 411 412 413 414 417 418 419416

Social linguistics and literacies: ideology in

discourses

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Barker, David

Oxford University Press

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Linguistics

Social Linguistics

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CHRIS GAUL

Design as Catalyst

THANKS

DESIGN AS CATALYSTFOR UTS:CI LABS

@malbooth July, 2012

UTS:LIBRARY

design catalyst ci lab notes

Documents

merge blake

redevelop discovery services

special collection development

visual identity

library collection

chris gaul

artistinresidence program

collaborative creativity