Insights, threads, connections, foci

We’ve been discussing the environmental impact of post-it notes as driven by designer behaviour. Perhaps this is our next design challenge. But for the moment, we’re using coloured paper off-cuts with blue tac to help us identify requirements from the brief, identify different dimensions of the problem and map the insights we have identified from some of our research.

Dear Reviewers, Just to be clear, this is not our literature review for mini-challenge 1. That will come very soon. Thanks!

As we stated in our previous post, we started by doing a quick review of the brief just to give us an idea of the challenge or problem that SLV faces.

Each of us then reviewed some of the recommended readings provided in the task sheet. As we did this, we made notes of what we are calling “insights” — things that give us an understanding of the needs of stakeholders (SLV, libraries, communities, people, etc.) that have an interest in the problem domain.

Exploring the challenge facing the SLV and defining requirements from the brief.

insights

The sorts of things we identified ranged across a number of areas.

Kleiner, Rädle and Reiterer (2013) identified that the ability to browse was an important aspect of many people’s experience in using libraries.

An online questionnaire … revealed that 56% of the users check library shelves when they are looking for literature … The qualitative feedback of our study confirmed the importance of shelf browsing for the users … and gave a first insight into the advantages of shelf browsing.

Physical items make available a channel of information arising from visual appearance that is sometimes lost or, at least, not attended to as much in a digital list of items.

We were inspired by Leckie & Hopkins (2002) recognition of the current challenges facing libraries in maintaining their social and cultural role.

The social roles these public institutions play for society is a pressing issue in light of decreasing public funding, advancing information technologies, and an economy increasingly information-driven and decentralize.

This paper provided us with an important reminder of the fact that libraries are really symbols of societal values and play an important role in supporting culture within our society. They represent the importance a society places on knowledge and the accessibility of that knowledge. They create a space that support cohabitation and where that cohabitation is not based on any social contracts or other requirements, particularly those based in commerce.

Libraries also play an important role supporting community. Chowdhury, Poulter and McMenemy (2006) call for libraries to extend the knowledge that they “store and disseminate” to incorporate community knowledge.

In conclusion, we are at one with Dolan in calling for a “cultural change” in public library services, and propose that the new role of public libraries will be to move from solely providing access to knowledge to acting as a platform for the storage and dissemination of local community knowledge within the global context created by twenty‐first century digital technologies.

After we had identified requirements from the brief, we created an organic map of the aspects of the problem domain that had also been outlined in the brief. Finally, we overlaid the insights we had identified from our preliminary review of literature.

threads

We then created a mapping of three things:

• the key elements of the challenge facing SLV as posed in the brief
• aspects of the problem domain as also identified in the brief
• the insights we had generated from our preliminary review of literature

The elements of the challenge naturally formed three themes:

• Finding: discoverability and visibility particularly of the breadth of available and related resources.
• Transferring: enabling people to “take” digital resources easily.
• Using: enabling people to use a resource to either add value to it or create something new or both.

We created an organic map of the aspects of the problem domain. To do this we first identified individual aspects of the problem domain as was identified in the brief and wrote them onto separate cards. Then, we placed these cards onto a board that represented the complete “world” of the problem domain. As we placed each card, we considered how related or different it was to the cards already on the board. By the end of this process we had created a series of themes or, really, sub-domains within the whole problem domain.

On top of this map, we added the insights that we had identified from our preliminary literature review. Again, we created this organically, each time deciding whether something was related or different to what was already in our “world”. The most valuable part of this process was the discussion that we had as we did this. Why did we think something was related or different? Why did we disagree on something? This discussion helped us developed a deeper and shared understanding of the insights we had identified. It also helped us understand each of our perspectives about those insights.

Sub-domains that emerged from our organic mapping and the connections that we identified as we were mapping.

threads

As we did this mapping, we talked about connections between the elements of the challenge as conceptualised in the brief. So our final step was to make these connections visible and describe them in a little more detail.

foci

Even though we can’t consider it to be in any way complete, our organic map was still pretty big. We needed to constrain what we would be designing for. So we used a process informed by dotmocracy to help us identify the sub-domains that most interested or appealed to us. Ordinarily we would have done this by involving stakeholders in the problem or situation that we were addressing, however due to the nature of this design challenge, we did this ourselves.

Based on our votes we identified four foci for our design work:

1. Inclusivity
2. Working with and supporting a community
3. Helping people to make, create and add value through digital resources
4. Libraries as platforms to support societal values and culture

Our future design work will focus on these.