Justin Schell
Director, Shapiro Design Lab, Library
University of Michigan
Meghan Sitar
Director, Connected Scholarship, Library
University of Michigan
Laurie Alexander
Associate University Librarian – Teaching & Learning
University of Michigan
At a large research university library, we have established new approaches to service design built on intentional, inclusive, and transparent collaboration and experimentation in the form of pilots and prototypes. At the same time, we received a three-year Institute of Museum and Library Services grant with our university’s School of Information designed to provide authentic learning and research experiences to current School of Information students, working in partnership with teams of librarians in three distinct labs. One lab supported by this grant includes an intergenerational team of graduate students, an early career librarian, and two senior librarians building structures and research methods to apply design thinking to library services. Our presentation will exhibit early outcomes of this grant and its intersection with broader service design efforts in the university. The two projects supported by first and second year of the lab will be detailed, describing user research and service design around the graduate student scholar and the development of a toolkit to support user experience research across the library. We will explore the benefits of both our approaches to service design and the embedding of a research lab focused on design thinking in the structure of the organization as a way to ask questions and design future user-focused spaces and services with the library.