The document outlines the UTS Library's vision and challenges towards 2017. It discusses implementing new technologies like RFID, consolidating two campus libraries, and planning for a future library. The library faces challenges like staying relevant and engaging with contemporary culture. It aims to connect people, knowledge, and culture at the heart of the campus. Culture will help distinguish the library and provide inspiration and context for knowledge. The library will focus on discovery, a new service model using new technologies, and collaboration through interaction spaces.

1. Design as
Catalyst at UTS
Library
FOR UTS:CI LABS UTS:
@malbooth July, 2012 LIBRARY

2. Design as Catalyst
Library Challenges
1. Rapidly changing information environment
2. Becoming more proactive (we are too passive)
3. Staying relevant & engaging with
contemporary culture
4. Educating & preparing new librarians

3. Design as Catalyst
UTS Library Challenges
1. Implement & exploit ASRS & RFID technology
2. Consolidate two campus libraries in the city
3. Plan a future library with relevant services

4. IMAGE: UTS Campus Master Plan
LEARNING COMMONS
LIBRARY RETRIEVAL SYSTEM
Relocated & upgraded UTS Library
Underground

5. Design as Catalyst
The Library Retrieval System hole being dug (right now - July 2012).

6. Design as Catalyst
A big idea
(inspiration)
We face many changes and challenges as we approach a big new future library space and new technologies over
the next five years. So, we’ve mapped out our approach to all of this in advance.

7. Design as Catalyst
UTS:Library Vision
Connecting people,
knowledge & culture
at the heart of the
campus

8. Design as Catalyst
UTS Library:Towards 2017 & Beyond
Culture Knowledge Collaboration

9. Design as Catalyst
UTS Library:Towards 2017 & Beyond
UTS : Library
2017+ Providing
Inspiration
Culture
Adding Context Recognising UTS
to the Knowledge Achievements
Culture is both critical and pivotal to our future. It helps to distinguish us from online services and from a world in
which libraries have become buildings for books.
As well as proving inspiration, meaning and context for knowledge, it helps us connect people to knowledge and
to connect people within our community.

10. Design as Catalyst
UTS Library:Towards 2017 & Beyond
UTS : Library
2017+
Exciting Curiosity
Discovery
Knowledge
New Service
New Technology
Model
Our efforts with discovery must drive curiosity about our collections and our services. The new technologies we
are employing like RFID and ASRS will lead to the design and development of a new service model for our library.
That is already starting with research in 2012 into how our users behave and what they need from us.

11. Design as Catalyst
UTS Library:Towards 2017 & Beyond
UTS : Library
2017+
Knowledge
http://youtu.be/dhYIOE7gERA
Please watch the video. It only lasts just over a minute.

12. Design as Catalyst
UTS Library:Towards 2017 & Beyond
UTS : Library
2017+
Spaces for Interaction
Connections
Collaboration
Inter-disciplinarity Neutral Space
Collaboration can be enhanced by spatial and furniture design, but we must also be more active in connecting our
users to encourage collaboration and in going beyond just providing access to a neutral space that isn’t owned by
a particular faculty or school within the University. Interactivity between faculties must be encouraged by the
provision of spaces and services in the Library that facilitate those connections.

13. UTS Library 2017 +
HOW
Ethos Methods Tools
Sustainable (Co) Design People
Socially responsible Engagement Collections
& Innovative Technology
New Building(s)
This is our how slide. We are only starting this journey, so it is early days yet and we expect some things to
change and evolve as we progress.

14. Design as Catalyst
UTS Library:Towards 2017 & Beyond
Collaboration
Right Now
2012 Envisioned Library
Knowledge
2017
Culture
2012 2017
What we hope for by 2017 is the development of a broader impact across the collaboration-knowledge-culture
spectrum than we have right now in 2012.

15. Design as Catalyst
Three Design Challenges
1. Designing the New Library Spaces
2. Designing a New Service Model
3. Designing a New Organisation to Move into
the New Space & Deliver the New Service
Model.

16. Design as Catalyst
Section 01
UTS Library 2017 >
Timeline
2012 2013 2014 2015
PRESENT

17. Design as Catalyst
MERGE BLAKE & KG LIBRARY
REDEVELOP DISCOVERY SERVICES
RFID PHASE 2
2012 2013 2014 2015
PRESENT

18. Design as Catalyst
MERGE BLAKE & KG LIBRARY
REDEVELOP DISCOVERY SERVICES
RFID PHASE 2
LRS EXCAVATION LRS BUILD LRS INSTALLATION & LOAD
2012 2013 2014 2015
PRESENT

19. Design as Catalyst
MERGE BLAKE & KG LIBRARY
REDEVELOP DISCOVERY SERVICES
RFID PHASE 2
LRS EXCAVATION LRS BUILD LRS INSTALLATION & LOAD
SPECIAL COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
ARTIST–IN–RESIDENCE PROGRAM
2012 2013 2014 2015
PRESENT

20. Design as Catalyst
REDEVELOP DISCOVERY SERVICES MERGE BLAKE & KG LIBRARY
RFID PHASE 2
LRS EXCAVATION LRS BUILD LRS INSTALLATION & LOAD
DEVELOP NEW SERVICE CO-DESIGN SPATIAL BRIEF FOR REDEVELOPMENT OF BLAKE
MODEL NEW LIBRARY LIBRARY SPACES
SPECIAL COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
ARTIST–IN–RESIDENCE PROGRAM
2012 2013 2014 2015
PRESENT

21. Design as Catalyst
Collaborative Creativity (1)
First, some history dating back well before we started talking about considered design or design thinking. Before
we even knew what our challenges would pan out to be ...
We started involving staff in our planning some years ago. To liven it up and to encourage broader and more
meaningful engagement by all staff who could attend (it was never compulsory), we made the sessions more
playful as workshops facilitated by junior professional staff over two half days. People were encouraged to build
prototypes of their ideas and asked to explain them to all. We Tweeted the sessions for all to see live on Twitter.
(You can see a live tweet-stream in the image on the right from early 2010. That was way before #QANDA did it.)
A collaboratively creative environment had been created through play and all levels of staff participated in the
small teams together.
This was later written up in a scholarly journal artical by Dr Suzanna Sukovic with David Litting and Ashley
England.
We were practicing some of the methods of co-design and participatory design in a process that was very similar
to a design thinking workshop without even knowing what those things were.

22. Design as Catalyst
Collaborative Creativity (2)
We had a strong record of working with current and future stakeholders to try and gain a sense of what they
wanted or imagined for our future and their future library. Here is pictured a workshop of junior high school
students who will become our future undergrads. They gave very insightful descriptions of what they thought was
important for our future library.

23. Design as Catalyst
Atriums & Curves Greenery & Water Media Spaces Obvious Sustainability
Art & Randomness Intuitive Tech Meaningful signage Thematic Identity
These points are what the year 7 & 9 students told us they wanted in a university library of the future after a half
day informal workshop in our current library in September of 2010.
Some of the things they told us:
Extended learning - the opportunity to learn beyond the set curriculum (i.e. art & culture should be prominent in a
library).
What can we do to provide randomness in our libraries? Everything we do is about (mostly outdated ontologies
and structures!).
Gaming & media spaces are probably essential now. A library without them in the future will be irrelevant.
Orientation spaces have a significant effect, more significant than any signage, on the behaviour of those entering.
It is expected by our clients.
Water features, greenery and natural light are probably things we would wish to see ourselves.
Future students will expect all technology that we provide to be intuitive. If it isn’t it won’t be used.
Signage can be over-done, and to be effective it must be meaningful.
Our future students expect like-books to have some kind of thematic identity that gives users/readers a clue
about their content.
I didn’t really understand why students said they liked the curved spaces in the UTS Library until I saw those of the
Philological Library in Berlin’s Free University.
Library spaces and services must learn to be customisable and personalised. Maybe we are too precious about
those spaces and don’t understand their true potential.
We want our future library to be a social hub, but it also must provide exposure to culture, so the use of art within
the library will be critical.
Our sustainability initiatives must be visible and demonstrate our progress (or not) in all dimensions/facets.
Comfy chairs are essential because patrons simply will not spend every hour in a library awake.
“Lack of rules” perhaps indicates that we still have too many rules, or too many signs indicating the rules. Perhaps
there are other ways to influence and encourage behaviour besides rules?

24. Design as Catalyst
Design Catalyst #1
Dr Penny Hagen
PDC 2010
#GlebeCM
@pennyhagen
So, at some stage in 2010, I ran into Penny Hagen who was then completing her PhD at UTS. She skilfully
explained that what we were trying to do actually had a name as a design discipline or practice - codesign or
participatory design or user-centred design.
Penny connected me to the design community of Sydney via weekly morning coffee meet-ups in Glebe -
#GlebeCM. It seems that Penny knew people engaged in design thinking and UX and UI design from all over
Sydney. A met a dynamic, open, friendly and intelligent network of people from several design firms (Digital
Eskimo, Meld, Zumio, Neotony, etc.), independent designers, UI/UX people (from the ABC and Atlassian) and many
others and got to know them all pretty well over more than a year. I met even more people via
#DesignThinkingDrinks.
Penny also encouraged me to attend PDC 2010 at UTS: the first ever Participatory Design Conference held in the
Southern Hemisphere, which she helped organise. See the blog post http://www.frommelbin.blogspot.com.au/
2010/12/participatory-service-design.html and several subsequent posts from PDC that month.
Penny is a very skilled and energetic connector, facilitator, thinker, teacher and organiser. Unfortunately, she went
home to NZ after completing her PhD. I am ever grateful to her for introducing me to so many people who have
become friends, colleagues and design mentors for us at work. Her energy, enthusiasm, ideas and her network are
all missed in Sydney, but we stay in touch via Twitter and email. And now she is assisting a colleague and friend at
the Auckland University of Technology Library.
I cannot over-estimate the pivotal importance of meeting Penny as a critical point on our design journey.

25. Design as Catalyst
Design Catalyst #2
DAB Visual
Comms
Designing
Out Crime
DAB LAB
Maps of Sydney by Dr Kate
Sweetapple
Around the same time opportunities presented themselves for several of us engaged with planning our future
library to work with academic staff and students who were doing some really cool projects on augmented reality,
designing out crime, incidental data, etc. We’d already begun a strong relationship via the curator of our DAB LAB
Research Gallery to identify and borrow student design work for display in our library.
This led to informal meetings with several key Visual Communications academic staff and researchers and thew
acquisition of several of their creative works, like the playful data maps of Sydney shown above that map people
with avian, constellation and fish surnames against their addresses pulled from the Sydney White Pages database.
This new development of special collections was and is a key plank in the development of our future library.
The relationship also led to cooperation with those academics and also staff from Industrial Design to identify and
select key work from their graduate student exhibitions for acquisition by the library for its special collection.
Finally, this relationship, encouraged by informal meetings in cafes and with advice from curators of significant
private art collections, led to the 2012 Artist-in-Residence program and the hiring of a 2011 UTS Visual
Communications graduate as our resident designer. More from them later ...

26. Design as Catalyst
Design
Catalyst #3
U.lab
BikeTank 2011
In 2011 U.Lab was begun as a joint venture by UTS academics from the faculties of: Business; Design, Architecture
and the Built Environment; and Engineering & IT. One of their first programs was BikeTank and several library staff
participated enthusiastically over the 10 week program. I think this ongoing and strong commitment clearly
signalled our intent to learn more about the design thinking process and collaborative design by a diverse
community of people.
We formed a strong relationship with the u.labbers and they were engaged to facilitate our 2012 library planning
days as full design thinking labs.

27. Design as Catalyst
UTS:Library
Some Design
Initiatives 2010+
So, learning from some of the catalysts above gave us ideas and creative ethusiasm to try some new things over
the last few years ...

28. Design as Catalyst
LRS Design Team
HASSELL Studio
This image shows most of the design team for our underground Library Retrieval System (to use ASRS technology
from the US) at a weekly meeting held in Hassell Studio (the architects). I attended all of those meetings as the
client and also as the resident “expert” on ASRS in libraries. Initially I think some found it odd that the client
wanted to be so involved, but I felt we needed to understand all we could about this design project and also that
we should contribute to it. It was, I think, a mutually beneficial initiative.

29. Design as Catalyst
Design Mentors
Sustainability
Discovery (UX)
Planning
Service Design
Since then, we have tried several different design mentorships (for want of a better expression):
1. To understand both design thinking and being more sustainable at work, we asked Grant Young from Zumio
to lead a team of our supervisors and team leaders (the level beneath our layer of department managers) in a
project to get all staff involved in some meaningful sustainability initiatives. This project went in a very different
direction to what I had in mind, but the initiatives they came up with were successful, my ideas proved to be not
be required and most participants learnt much from the process itself.
2. We began a serious two-phased approach towards improving our collection discovery services and online
interfaces in 2011. As a first element of this we embarked on some ethnographic research to better understand
our clients and that was led by Digital Eskimo professionals. This was our first real attempt at professional UX
research on a significant scale and it also proved to be a valuable first step for this project.
3. As I mentioned before, this year (2012) we used u.lab to facilitate our two half-day planning sessions. They
helped us plan out the activities and goals for each day and encouraged us to invite some external guest speakers
to inspire us for each day. Both were brilliant: Steve Baty from Meld on Day #1; and Alison Heller from Urban
Affect on Day #2.
4. As you will recall from earlier slides, we have three design challenges: spatial, service and organisational
design. This year we wanted to make inroads with service design and for that we engaged the assistance of Meld
Studios as our latest design mentor. It is just kicking off but already we’ve planned our approach together and
several staff have attended a half day workshop at Meld to understand the research and data collection process. I
hope that Meld will also be able to deliver an introductory workshop for all of our managers on service design
soon.

30. Design as Catalyst
Special Collections
Developing a proper special collection for UTS Library had several objectives:
. reintroducing staff to the full curatorial process;
. developing a range of design-themed special collections that inspire our clients and provide more context for
their knowledge;
. developing a better understanding of the creative process involved in the production of such works;
. providing a new service that helps us to connect and engage with our community (because it largely comes from
them); and
. learning more about design ourselves at a time when our challenges all lie in that area.

31. Design as Catalyst
A New Visual
Identity ?
A COLLABORATION WITH
CHRIS GAUL & TOM FETHERS
This is an animated presentation that is best seen in presentation mode.
Chris is our first Artist in Residence & Tom is our in-house designer.
Together they facilitated a process to deliver a much-needed new visual identity for the library that assists us
present an engaging call for collaboration in the design of the future library as a cohesive set of visually
stimulating images.
After that there is an example of Chris’ work from his residency - some playful experimentation with Discovery
from a non-librarian’s perspective.

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48. Design as Catalyst
UTS:
LIBRARY

49. Design as Catalyst

50. Design as Catalyst
LEVEL
200s
PSYCHOLOGY &
PHILOSOPHY
300s
SOCIAL SCIENCES
LEARNING
COMMONS
SPECIAL NEEDS
ROOM

51. Design as Catalyst

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57. Design as Catalyst
AXIS UTS:
LIBRARY
ISSUE 05 / 2012
> Open Reserve Upgrade
> Insiders Guide To Getting Published
> Pat Corrigan Bookplate Collection

58. Design as Catalyst

59. Design as Catalyst
UTS:
2013 LIBRARY
–
LIBRARY HANDBOOK
NE W OLD
T YPOGRAPHY GEOGRAPHY
MAKE TAKE
HAMLE T BRITNE Y
SEMESTER E X AM

60. As our first Artist in Residence, Chris has helped us to understand beyond what we know, he has given us fresh
new perspectives on our challenges and presented us with stimulating original ideas.
As we prepare to store almost 80% of our physical collection in an underground automated retrieval system, the
nature of online interfaces for exploring the collection and browsing books becomes even more relevant.
Rather than being sterile and uninspiring, these interfaces can be creative, unexpected tools that encourage playful
exploration and serendipitous discovery.
What follows is one of Chris’ concepts that challenge our current understanding of the ways we search for and find
items in vast library collections. He has other concepts that ask if we could allow users to wander the shelves
wearing headphones and listening to the babble of books reading themselves aloud. What if our users could tune
into different frequencies of the books, or use their Dewey call numbers to call them on phones?
You can see more of Shelf Life here (with links for further reading) http://www.flickr.com/photos/malbooth/sets/
72157631383600686/

61. Design as Catalyst

62. Design as Catalyst
Artist-in-Residence
CHRIS GAUL
Library Collection 924,903 Items
000 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900

63. Design as Catalyst
Artist-in-Residence
CHRIS GAUL
Library Collection 924,903 Items
000 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900

64. Design as Catalyst
Artist-in-Residence
CHRIS GAUL
Languages 12,043 Items
400 410 420 430 440 450 460 470 480 490

65. Design as Catalyst
Artist-in-Residence
CHRIS GAUL
Languages 12,043 Items
400 410 420 430 440 450 460 470 480 490

66. Design as Catalyst
Artist-in-Residence
CHRIS GAUL
Linguistics 1,918 Items
410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419
Social linguistics and literacies: ideology in
discourses
Author: Barker, David
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Format: Print
Subject: Linguistics
Social Linguistics
Availability: City Campus 412.2BARK Available
City Campus 412.2BARK Recently Returned
City Campus 412.2BARK Due 23 FEB
This book is recommended by 14 people Recommend this book

67. THANKS
DESIGN AS CATALYST
FOR UTS:CI LABS UTS:
LIBRARY
@malbooth July, 2012