Design as Catalyst presentation

Design Catalyst CI Lab Notes from Mal Booth
This presentation includes speaker's notes against quite a few of the slides.
It was given during the UTS:CI Labs Series 1 in July 2012.

UTS Library & Sustainability

UTS Library & Sustainability

View more presentations from Mal Booth

If you have Keynote, and let's face it why wouldn't you have Keynote, you can download the full presentation with the speaker's notes from Slideshare.

BikeTank and service design

As BikeTank approaches its third week I am really impressed with the energy and participation it enjoys as people come together at u.lab to try to encourage the use of bikes, plan better infrastructure and take shared action in ensuring a sustainable future for Sydney city.

Here are some images that hopefully tell some more of the story, i.e. what, where, who, how, when:

So apart from my personal interest in the outcomes from all of this why am I going?

There are several reasons:

• I think it is a great initiative by several academics from across a number of faculties within UTS and I think we in UTS Library should be supportive of such steps. (Yes, that is a big hint for some of you reading this.)
• I'd like to learn more about the whole Design Thinking process by seeing it in action. I reckon that most adults learn more about a process by being immersed in it than attending a seminar or workshop.
• BikeTank is also about Social Innovation and a sustainable future. Those two concepts are critical to our future at UTS Library as we plan a future Library at the heart of our city campus. As well as implementing new technologies including ASRS, RFID and vastly improved online discovery (not just search but true discovery!) and building a grand new modern library that isn't primarily a book storage facility, we need to evolve as an organisation and imagine and develop a new service model. I reckon that we'd be pretty well served by a similarly inclusive and collaborative process. So here is my vision for that:

Green Travel Planning

Today a work colleague sent me something that pointed to some research by our (UTS) Institute for Sustainable Futures on Green Travel Planning. They are looking for support and potential participants for projects they are developing: one on car-sharing in multi-residential developments and the other is a course on travel planning for professionals engaged in planning relevant new developments for 2011.

They say the initiative to plan travel for workplaces can result in substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reduced traffic congestion for workplaces like university campuses, industrial parks, hospitals, office precincts and multi-residential developments. That, however, doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to do something along the same lines in smaller institutions like libraries. We should certainly incorporate a green travel plan as a design consideration for our Library of the Future which is in its very early planning stages. Maybe we could also make a realistic contribution now just by setting an example for others to follow.

Perhaps it is too late in an existing institution to incorporate much that involves substantial investment in facilities or even additional construction, but there might be other steps we can take that could make a realistic, if small scale contribution. We could for example:

• raise awareness among our staff and encourage the use of alternative forms of transport that are more environmentally friendly (public transport, cycling and walking where feasible);
• encourage and perhaps facilitate car sharing or pooling arrangements;
• lobby for cycling or public transport subsidies instead of salary packaging for cars;
• improve and encourage the use of end-of-trip cycling and running amenities like showers and lockers;
• seek funds and/or equipment to improve video or online-conferencing facilities in our workplaces (vice long-distance air travel);
• arrange bike maintenance classes for staff and provide basic shared repair facilities at work;
• look more closely at flexible work arrangements that encourage working from home where appropriate or travel during non-peak periods;
  
• highlight and profile those of our colleagues who make the effort to use more sustainable forms of transport as examples for others to follow;
• run and celebrate regular voluntary Car Free days; and
  
• try some schemes that offer incentives to car poolers, bikers, runners, walkers or public transport users.

The implementation of some sustainability initiatives in our library is now on our strategic plan for the coming year after it was suggested by staff at our planning days. Maybe working up our own Green Travel Plan is a good start. What are you doing in your workplace?

The image is one of my bikes in my office at work.

UTS on future academic libraries

On 9 February 2010 Dr Belinda Tiffen, Sophie McDonald and me from the UTS Library presented some ideas for our future Library to a national library conference in Melbourne (VALA2010).

As part of the UTS City Campus Master Plan, we have begun the early stages of planning for a new library building or “learning commons” on Broadway that will set new standards for online and physical services to our clients (students, researchers, academics and staff), green culture and operations, and our own work environment. About 60% of our current collection will be buried in a robotically-served retrieval system under Alumni Green (adjacent to the new library building), freeing up the library space for things other than book storage. That facility will be designed and built in the near future.

Our ideas for the future library were presented in three short but entertaining video clips outlining scenarios for:

• students (by UTS students James Shepherd, Dan Miller and friends),
• researchers and
• our staff (in homage the the well-known CommonCraft videos).

Some observations about VALA 2010

I made a few flippant and some serious observations about VALA 2010 on Twitter over the last week or so. Well, OK then, quite a lot really. I'll try and be less flippant and a little bit deeper in this post. Promise.
Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the huge effort put in by all of those involved in putting this conference together. It really is an immense task and far too much to arrange for anyone wanting to keep their original hair colour. We should all be grateful to those who volunteered their time and energy to make the conference run so well.
From a content perspective, I think it had something for everyone and I know that the Program Committee made every formal and informal effort to consult with people about who to ask to give keynotes. I was also aware that people like David Feighan (the Program Chair) made an effort to encourage people to take some risks with what they said and to present it in an entertaining way. His opening address and welcome featuring the short video by Abbey the Digiberal Native was a brilliant example for us to follow. (If only David was wearing a tie.)
So, I came away satisfied that the conference pushed the buttons I wanted to have pushed:

• stimulating content and ideas that challenged some of my views or reminded me of reality (from RFID to networked books);
• the opportunity to swap ideas with colleagues from all over Australasia (& beyond!);
• the chance to let others know what we are up to;
• the opportunity to have some fun (away) with some of my colleagues and some new friends;
• stimulus to write a paper and prepare a presentation on a topic of some importance to us;
• connecting with old colleagues;
• watching and listening to some up-and-coming rock stars of the library world who are so passionate and enthusiastic about what they do; and
• sometimes I just needed a laugh (thanks to many of my Twitter friends and especially John Garraway from the University of Auckland who has a real gift for timing and delivery).

I don't think the real value, in terms of connections, content, conversations and encouragement, that such conferences give to their attendees can be discounted.

So, to some brief observations from my perspective:

SUSTAINABILITY: I was pretty surprised that this issue did not come up much apart from our (UTS) presentation. It is a major priority for us and was one of the main conference themes at Educause09.

TWITTER: It provided a very valuable back-channel for this conference and I think that, like Educause09 in Denver, if you didn't at least lurk, you missed a vital and really useful dimension of VALA2010. As @flexnib tweeted: "all of us are smarter than any of us". In a way, it provided a cloud for the crowd.

CLOUD COMPUTING: This issue emerged and was debated in several sessions, but again, I was surprised that it didn't feature on as many agendas as it might have.

ROCK STARS: I am glad that some new young Australian library "rock stars" are starting to emerge. I'm thinking of people like Paul Hagon, Kat Clancy and our own Sophie McDonald to name just a few of them. They need to be encouraged as examples for others to follow. Their essential role in connecting us to our clients or just the broader public cannot be underestimated.

INSPIRATION & LEARNING FROM OUTSIDE THE SECTOR: I really enjoyed two of the keynotes as they made me think . . . about everything. Firstly there was the wonderful Stephanie Orlic from Museum Lab, Musée du Louvre and finally we had McKenzie Wark from the New School for Social Research in New York. Both were brilliant. You could also argue that Paul Hagon's "cataloguing by faces and colours" session on 10 February was along the same lines - thinking outside the box.

FROM LITTLE THINGS . . . : One thing that disappointed me was hearing, I think from a panellist, that what some public and state libraries are doing in digitising their own historical collections and other popular and/or rare collection material is insignificant or really doesn't matter much. Well, I'm sorry, but it does. It matters big time. As Paul Kelly said "From little things, big things grow". It is an important start and if our public institutions don't make a start then someone else will start pulling the rug from under us. We should be encouraging any digitisation of cultural materials, not just endlessly debating which metadata schema to use or how to moderate user-created data, should we ever decide to allow it. What NLA is doing with Trove , what the Australian War Memorial has done with war diaries and more recently C.E.W. Bean's First World war records and what the State libraries and some public libraries are doing to provide online access to and digital preservation of our cultural and historical heritage is very important and a great example for others to follow. If we were really a clever nation, by now we'd have a national cultural digitisation strategy.

That's all!