Fostering Organizational Change through Service and Space Design Strategy

Abstract

In Spring 2017, the University of Michigan Library completed an engagement with brightspot strategy, consultants who worked with our academic user community and staff to design a service framework and space strategy to guide our organization's work into the future. This holistic framework and philosophy have the potential to transform our large organization's approach to designing and delivering aligned and impactful user experiences. A Service Design Task Force was formed to take this strategy and begin to design pilots and prototypes for new and evolved services and spaces, with a particular focus on enhancing the library's ability to partner around consultation, digital scholarship, and designing for emergence. The three members of the Task Force represent expertise in learning and teaching services, user experience, space design, discovery services, and web technologies. Our goal in this work is to transform our organization's capacity to design, deliver, and iterate high quality virtual and physical services in 21st-century learning and research environments within the library through user and staff engagement, rapid prototyping, and design thinking. In our presentation, the Task Force members will share current and future strategies for engaging the organization in this work, including tools and formats for design and discussion that have supported our work with the library community. We'll also discuss next steps for piloting and prototyping new service ideas in existing library spaces in order to inform future space transformations.