Category: Design

Sketch-notes – Swing is the Soul of the Groove

Dick Rijken keynote
ALIA Information Online 2013

Dick Rijken’s keynote Swing is the Soul of the Groove was one that I arranged, so again, maybe I am biased here, but I loved it. It seemed to me at least that the whole week flowed into his final keynote and he nicely wrapped up many of the main themes. He stressed culture over the vogue words: creativity and innovation. He illustrated his points with visual and musical storytelling and I was in two minds as to whether I should just watch or try to record some thoughts and reminders.

It was fantastic to hear someone of his standing reminding us of the importance of things like ambiguity, not knowing or understanding, romanticism, aestheticism, experimentation and trusting our intuition. All are hard to tie down, to justify or to measure quantitatively, but in the end are they not some of the things that distinguish us from robots or automatons? And certainly I think they are critical to our sector. For too long I think we’ve been obsessed with making things more efficient, more specialised, less connected and easily measured. We need to rediscover the underlying meaning in what we do. As Dick said, an artistic mentality can be very helpful to us in finding that meaning and in truly understanding what we are supposed to be doing.

I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with Dick last week and to present a workshop with him last Friday. Not only did I learn a great deal from him, I was stimulated and energised by the many discussions we had.

Sketch-notes – Charles Leadbeater

Charles Leadbeater’s keynote
ALIA Information Online 2013

Charles Leadbeater is described as a leading thinker on the future of learning and his Skype presentation really lived up to its promise. Again we were reminded that solutions cannot be found by looking only or primarily at technology or systems. He encouraged us to empathise with our clients and to facilitate connections and develop and facilitate meangingful relationships. He said that eventually technology would bother us less and simply help support those social relationships. His keynote was one of the main highlights for me.

Sketch-notes – Sue Gardner, Wikimedia

Sue Gardner’s keynote at ALIA Information Online 2013

Sue Gardner from Wikimedia left us with some very important reminders about the importance of a free and open internet and how libraries must participate in that as advocates and by helping others to understand more about it. She encouraged us to do what we can to make knowledge freely available, just as Wikipedia does.

Sketch-notes – Sarah Drummond

Sarah Drummond’s keynote
ALIA Online 2013

Sarah Drummond provided a great deal of inspiration at ALIA Online, particularly for younger librarians who could identify with her in so many ways. She really engaged by participating in the New Librarians Seminar the weekend before the conference itself and then by running a one day workshop on design, that emphasised the importance of understanding and mapping your customers’ journeys, after the conference. She was one of several keynoters who urged us to start with people and not technology and she was brave enough to tell us that we hold too much fear and that results in our attachment to too much command and control. We need to let go more.

Sketch-notes – Designing Better Library Experiences

Zaana Howard’s session at ALIA Online 2013

Zaana gave a very short session on designing better user experiences in libraries. Her key messages (above) were few and short, but memorable and wise. I think they were timely reminders and her research is evidence based. She had a verysignificant influence on the under current of service design in this conference and I thank her for her input on that.

Sketch-notes – Business Model Innovation

Tim Kastelle
Keynote at ALIA Information Online 2013

This is the first of a series of sketch notes from the ALIA Information Online conference held in Brisbane during February 2013. I have to declare that I was on the Program Committee for the conference, so maybe you’ll read some bias into my comments here. I’m trying to be objective.

The sketch notes above are from one of the first keynotes by Tim Kastelle from the University of Queensland Business School. I think one of his best messages for libraries (which you can see above) was to aggregate, filter and connect. I also liked his suggestion that obscurity was worse than piracy for content creators. He urged us to consider innovation in our business model (i.e. behavioural change), not simply in or through technology.

I think that keynote neatly set us off on what the Program Committee hoped would be a series of rather different messages and themes for the conference. These included:

  • Designing new services for people.
  • Finding and providing more meaning in what we do as cultural institutions.
  • Finding our voice and becoming better advocates for the public good (e.g. Open Access, Copyright reform and a sustainable future).
  • Putting people before technology.
  • The importance of empathy and user experience research.
  • Reassurance of the value in play, fail, learn as a strategy.

I’m still learning about the use of sketch-notes. They do force you to think more deeply about the messages you are hearing and how to represent them visually. I’m being mentored in this by one of my colleagues @thelibrarykim so I thank her for all of her tips and assistance. Her sketch-notes are always grand!

What did I say, think and write in 2012?

NYE2013 57

Just in case you missed it, and let’s face it you probably did, here is a listing.

With colleagues from UTS Library (S Schofield, B Tiffen) I co-authored the article “Change and Our Future at UTS Library: It’s Not Just about Technology.” Australian Academic & Research Libraries  43 (1) , 32- 45.

I contributed the essay “Design as a Catalyst for UTS Library” for J. Schweitzer & J. Jakovich (eds.) Crowd-Share Innovation: Intensive Creative Collaborations, Freerange Press ( 2012) , Ch. 2: 114- 119.

For the ALIA Biennial Conference Sydney 2012 (http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2012/), again with UTS colleagues (B Tiffen, J Vawdrey), I co-presented on Discovery for Academic Libraries.

Chapter/essay (about the future library) for forthcoming book on the 25th Anniversary of UTS edited by Paul Ashton & Debra Adelaide. (Publication title not known yet.)

Various conference, interviews, blog posts and seminar presentations including: