Research Library Innovation

A couple of weeks have passed since we updated you on how we were about to decide on a concept.

In this post we will focus on explaining the proposed concept. The basic “mechanisms” of the service are being tested now.

The concept is fairly simple, and we call it crowd-curation. To use a Silicon Valley cliché of explanation through analogy, it is a kickstarter-esque platform to suggest and support ideas for events to be held at the Black Diamond - or any similar cultural institution.

It is based on the wish to provide more opportunities for active and ambitious students, to get to see speakers who are relevant to what they are studying. As it is now, anyone can of course suggest a speaker via mail to the Diamond. But the Diamond would have no incentive to look at this proposal further than the mailbox. Meanwhile, students might be discouraged at the prospect of having to arrange facilities and audience large enough to invite a famous speaker by themselves. This platform proposal would help in these two scenarios, and it would also play into the strategy of the university, which is putting more emphasis on how students can spend time outside of the university more meaningfully.

The picture above shows a matrix-diagram of what motivates the different stakeholder interactions. You can read more about it at service design tools.

We have gone through the concept with operations staff in the cultural department, to find out which challenges and potentials they can see. We have also gone over the concept with behavioral designer and co-founder Simon of the behavioral design agency KL7. 

We have striven to keep the concept low-cost, and to focus on implementability in our delivery.

Next steps

In the following weeks we will focus on production of deliverables so we can hand over the project at the of the month. We will also try to obtain feedback from some of the experts who have helped us along the way, as well as from the students we interviewed early on.

Last week we presented three proposal ideas to our supervisor and our contact person at the library.

One of them was quickly discarded, but the other two were interesting to both of them in different ways.

Among ourselves we had subjective preferences about the pros and cons of each concept, but these gut feelings would not provide a very strong guiding light for decisions down the line. In the future, when developing our main proposal concept, we are going to be asking many questions of the concept, and the better we can answer these questions, the more reasonable a concept we can come up with.

So in order to evaluate the concepts as objectively as possible, we sat down and wrote down everything that had been said by our supervisors for and against, and added the challenges each concept presented.

Having written everything down made it clear which one to pursue as our main idea. We are happy that the idea we are choosing to go forward with is so grounded in a thorough design process, as well as based substantially on the needs we have heard about from all stakeholders.

In the last post we had come up with several ideas for concepts to present to the library. But in order to make the presentation clearer, we grouped our ideas and evaluated each them in terms of testability, relevance, feasibility and structure.

1) Testability: We wanted to have a discussion for each idea, about whether or not the concept is testable. Of course, turning fidelity down lets you test many aspects of a given service concept, but it was good to get on the same page in terms of how we would move for each concept.

2) Relevance: How does the concept align with what we’ve heard and seen during our research? We took good care to ground our ideation in research, but concepts may still be more or less aligned. Discussing relevance was also a good starting point for considering which stakeholders are involved.

3) Feasibility: A key concern in this project is cost, so our concept should incur little if any cost. When discussing our ideas in terms of cost, we also tried to list up the different cost-factors involved.

4) Structure: We had quite a few ideas, but when we looked at them against each other, it was clear that some where what we might call core ideas while others were more components, or touchpoint iterations within a core idea.

In this post we will outline the process we have gone through in the last week in order to get closer to what problem we should design a solution for. 

Getting more ideas

The second staff workshop was an interesting session in the sense that we heard some different ideas than what came about in the first workshop. We went through the workshop by first presenting our progress, then presenting the workshop activity, and finally moved on to doing two rounds of the activity. 

Affinity Mapping

We had now amassed a considerable amount of ideas - quantity over quality! - and we took a step back to group the ideas around common traits.

These groups included among other topics networking, student-to-student, library-to-student, during studies, after studies and physical space ideas.

Qualified Critque

Looking at these groups and the amount of ideas, we said to ourselves that we would not have the authority to simply pick and choose the ideas we liked the best. It would somehow be disingenuous at this point, as well as maybe counterproductive for the later process. So we decided to put together a group of students from different academic levels, and have a qualified critique session. This was essentially a focus group, but we were very clear about having an equal discussion. Namely, we did not simply ask the students: so, what do you want and what do you think?! Rather, we sent them the list of ideas that had been generated as a sort of homework, and then shuffled the ideas on the table in the room so they could spark conversation without directing it. 

In doing this, the conversation filtered through the different groupings of ideas, and some concepts were highlighted as more interesting and workable than others.

Revisiting the Conversation

After the session, the two of us sat down and went through the recording of the focus group and wrote down keywords and phrases, and connected these with our notes. In doing this we could then highlight the essential points, and outline the ideas that took shape during the conversation.

Developing Concepts

We now have so much of a direction to go in and try to develop some concepts to eventually prototype and think from.

Over the course of two days we freely write out concepts that somehow relate to the points that have been made during the sessions. These concepts are generated as low fidelity scenarios. We will then sort through the concepts and present them to 1) our contact person in the library and 2) our university supervisor.

We have spent the last week catching up with some writing about the process so far. By making sure to have 90% of our reflections about approaches and results written down as we go, we will hopefully save ourselves some hassle when we get closer to the deadline.

But this Friday we also had our first small ideation session of about 1 hour. Together with our contact person, we had invited two staffers in charge of communication efforts of the department we are embedded in.  The goals of the session was to 1) present our progress so far. 2) hear comments, reflections and ideas on our problem statement from the culture dept.’s perspective. 3) Practice the workshop format before we do it again next week with more participants from another department.

Playing with Open Cards

In terms of our first goal, we had compiled a short presentation of our research methods, and the main insights that led to our current project direction. The staffers agreed with our thoughts and decisions, so we could begin the session on the same page.

Many inside the organisation have heard about our project, but have not talked to us directly. Encouraged by curiosity among some staff, we have decided to produce a PDF-report on our process and thoughts, and distribute it on the intranet. Playing with open cards like this is an inclusionary effort, which many appreciate, as we thereby recognise our intention of making a service that everyone can agree on.

Getting Down to Business

The workshop itself had to be conducted during the lunch break. Thankfully people ate quickly while we presented our process, so the food did not interrupt the activity.

Inspired by this post, we had produced three sets of cards: a person card, which presents basic characteristics of how a student relates to the library and their studies. A wish- or statement-card which had a direct quote from a student about something they hoped to achieve. And finally a graphic card, which is supposed to spark lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is the act of taking a step away from the current path your mind is on with the materials given, in order to make new connections that help create new ideas.

The main purpose of the activity was actually the casual conversation between participants. So we only did two rounds of 4-5 minutes, and then took around 10 minutes after each to discuss and reflect. We gathered many good ideas and reflections, and although we cannot incorporate all of them into our final design, we will definitely produce a list of them to hand over to the staff later in the process, so they can continue building on the work we have done together.

This approach proved fruitful, but we did get some feedback during a short evaluation of the workshop in the end, which will inform how we conduct the next one in the week ahead.

Looking Forward to the Next One

After the workshop we did a short evaluation of how it had been, and what we might do differently. The participants liked the cards as a conversation starter, but we might not need to do more than 3 minutes of idea-generation with the cards. A couple of minutes is enough to get some ideas that could then be discussed in plenum.

First we wrote down about 25 different insights we have gotten so far, and grouped them under different themes.

With such an overview of the things we have encountered and heard about so far, we could evaluate them as directions for a project. We wanted to evaluate them, because we do not want to just do something because we like it personally, but because it has to be meaningful for the institution and for the students.

Paradigms

From what we have understood about the evolution of libraries so far, we roughly identified two paradigms of the library: the access paradigm, which passively provides access. This the traditionally valuable role. Then there is the service paradigm, which sees the library as a service provider which engages more actively with it's users. A project could innovate meaningfully within both paradigms.

After looking at the groups and discussed them in light of the paradigm-idea, we came up with the following three bigger themes.

Self-learning, where the activities such as curation of tools, information literacy and focus on empowerment takes place.

Co-creation of information, where the activity becomes to help people help each other find things. These two themes fall under what we could call the service paradigm.

And lastly “curation of people”, were access is provided to new media and material, central to the way students learn today. This falls under the access paradigm. This might for example provide access to a corps of students willing to participate in experiments, focus groups and the like.

Proceeding from Here

We then discussed what we need to know, in order to decide on the most relevant direction for our project. For this we need to talk to students to get more insight into the study journey, and also with staff in KU who might be able to tell us about where the trend of learning is moving, so the library can position itself accordingly - hopefully with something that come out of this project. We then proceed to ask, in what part of the organisation we could best emphasise existing or create new value to the students. After talking to some internal stakeholders we got a better (but not perfect!) understanding of how the library is organised and what interactions go on.

Interviews

In this phase of our research, we rely on open-minded observation and loosely structured, open-ended interviews. We do this because we have to quickly grasp as much as possible about the thoughts and feelings within the organisation, and what the conceptual space is. (will explain more here)

In this post we will explain how we prepare, conduct and process qualitative interviews.

Preparation

In preparing for an interview, we first and foremost consider who the interviewee is. This means checking if background information is available on the web, and consider specific questions that are especially relevant to ask in terms of how we think they can contribute to our project.

At this point in the process, when we do not have a clear problem statement to enquire about, the challenge becomes to come up with open-ended questions that we deem will provide us with relevant information.

We have dealt with this challenge differently, depending on whether we are interviewing someone inside or outside the organisation.

We have been eager to interview people outside of the organisation in order to get a deeper understanding of the conceptual space our project operates within. By this we mean, what approaches to the university and research library exists? Where are trends pointing towards? What a current challenges and what kind of future actions are discussed in the community?

In terms of understanding the organisation, we first of all take care to ask questions that relate to the interviewee’s everyday experience, but from there we try to ask questions that as smoothly as possible uncovers the interactions between different levels of divisions within the organisation as a whole. How

Conducting

The way we then go about conducting the interview, is that we have 1) make sure to record the whole seance with the interviewee’s permission. 2) Designate one of us as notetaker, and the other one as interviewer. This allows for a more natural, attentive conversation, without having to look down into the notebook during the interview. 3) We make sure to have the person in front of us relax, by not asking directly about the subject-matter, but starting out with friendly, contextual questions that are not “dangerous” to any party. The opposite would be to ask divisive questions right after we sat down. 4) As a little trick learned from a mentor, we always leave the recorder on while we are standing up and saying good bye. Right in that moment, people relax and often reflect on the whole interview at once and provide comments that frame the whole.

Post-Processing

After we have done the interview, we conduct a so-called daily interpretive analysis (DIA). This activity is outlined in this instructor’s note from Miami University: Collecting and analysing interview data. 

The main reason for conducting an interpretive analysis daily is that the data gathered through an hour-long semi-structured interview, is quite fragile. As the conversation goes on, insights appear and directs the interview. These interviews can be really interesting, but the notes taken or even the audio recording can seldom capture all the small cues that made the conversation interesting in the first place. Coming back to your notes after a week or more, it is already difficult to recall those cues and stray-thoughts that inspired you during the conversation. The data is fragile because it can decay in this way. Quantitative data, on the other hand, is not as contextual as the numbers or the analysis does not change.