Malmö City Library: Service Design Project

Group project

My role: I participated in the whole design process, but the tasks I performed on my own were designing a set of cards for the design game as well as recording, directing and editing the video.

Tools: Miro, Adobe XD, Canva, InShot

During this project, we collaborated with Malmö City Library to create visions about how and what a library might be. We focused on creating innovative solutions to strengthen the awareness about the city library among citizens of Malmö and to engage people more in library's life, activities and services. We were focusing on what the library could provide for people and the metaphor of a library as "palaces for the people" was our guideline during the project.

Research

By visiting the library and interviewing a librarian, we understood that the library allows a range of behaviors and interactions. We felt that different rooms had different atmospheres, which implies different social behavior. We saw that visitors were for the main part coexisting in the library. Maybe people want it to be like this, but maybe they are restrained by their prejudice regarding the library space.

At the library we saw that people were connecting at Kanini through their children. The children and the setting invited for connection between the adults. This led us to reflect on why this is happening at Kanini and why conversations didn’t flow as naturally at some other places at the library, and what could be done for this to change.

Ideation

The library already has services that support regularly occurring meetings, in the form of for instance book clubs. Therefore, we decided to focus on how we could encourage short, unplanned meetings. To do this, we wanted to create objects or activities that could serve as icebreakers to ease conversation-starting.

The objects or activities should create reasons to interact that should feel effortless and easy going, and for those participating in them to feel no obligation to continue with the relationship if they don't wish to, we called these social triggers.

The design game

To better understand what social triggers can be, and how they could serve different spaces in the library, we created a design game. The design game consisted of two parts and was conducted in a workshop at Krut where visitors were invited to participate.

In the first part, participants shared their perceptions of what kind of social behaviors and activities are appropriate in different library areas. The participants were also asked to create “their own room”, where they specified how a section in their ideal library would be.

In the second part of the workshop, we held a co-brainstorming session. The participants brainstormed ways to connect people in a library setting in topics that aren't necessarily library-related. With this, the intention was to move away from the superficial view of libraries as mere places for books and imagine the library in a new way.

Insights

From the workshop, we gained the following insights:

1. For some library areas, people had a shared understanding of what activities and social behaviors are more fitting to do there, whereas other spaces were seen as less “defined”.

2. Krut is a room that people have a common understanding of and that is inviting for social interactions. A less well-defined room is for example the main floor of Slottet.

3. The library is seen as a place where new connections can be made, however there is a wish for more places that allow for connections to happen in a natural way.

Conclusion

Our vision is based on the participants' desire to form social connections in the library. We propose that social triggers can be introduced in these spaces to ease the first point of connections. The trigger needs to respect the identity of the room. For rooms that do not have a strong identity, a social trigger could function as a way to create an identity for the room, by showing what behaviors are socially accepted.

We suggest that the social triggers can include collaborations with local organizations, to deepen the library’s work with the local community in accordance with development area 3. For example, in our first example of a social trigger, “the creative table” collaborated with a local organization called “hjälpstickan”, which is an organization that helps people in need by giving them warm knitted clothing made by donors.

This also connects with the development area 1. Through use of social triggers, libraries can help strengthen the democratic dialogue. In addition to that it will bring different people together providing equal access.

Our vision of having social triggers to invite visitors to connect with each other aligns with the vision of the City Library to enable a place where knowledge can be exchanged and to meet as citizens of Malmö.

Authors:

Abhishek Girie

Adam Björk

Anna Korczak

Sanna Lindholm

Stefanie Luethen