|
|
 |
| |
Library consultants’ ‘mood-o-meter’
Techniques used by £2,000-a-day American firm brought in to overhaul service are revealed
A LEAKED diary has revealed the eccentric brainstorming tasks set by £2,000-a-day consultants brought in to help overhaul Camden’s library service.
IDEO, an American firm based in Clerkenwell, Islington, were paid £47,000 for 23 days’ work on the “Growing Your Library” project over the summer.
Following a Freedom of Information request last month, the council said releasing details of the work carried out by IDEO was not in the “public interest” as they had yet to finalise their plans or launch a consultation.
But the New Journal has now seen the documents and can reveal it was the small council team – made up of nine staff from the culture and environment department including four librarians – who developed proposals to change the library service.
It comes as the Town Hall confirmed they are paying a design agency £14,000 to “update the appearance of our libraries and make them nicer places to visit and work in”. The library budget will be cut by £2million over the next four years with 15 staff set to lose their jobs as self-service machines are introduced.
One of the brainstorming techniques, referred to by IDEO as “deep diving,” was the use of a “mood-o-meter”. It involved a physical map, pasted to a wall, depicting the “probable mood variations” Camden’s staff would experience during the sessions.
One shocked member of staff said: “I find it interesting that Mike Clarke [Camden’s head of libraries] chose to use the money that could have paid the wages for two or three staff to hire a firm to talk about ‘mood-o-meters’ and get people to write out a few ideas on Post-its.”
Pearls of wisdom taken from the IDEO handbook included “good brainstorms are seeded with great questions” and the practice of “analogous observation”, or comparing one industry to another and learning lessons from it.
The member of the council team who wrote Day Two’s diary said: “One example of analogous observation, between otherwise very different industries, was a hospital surgery team that went to a Formula 1 race to watch a pit team in action and to see what they could learn from what they saw.”
The theory was then applied to the group as they brainstormed using visits to businesses unrelated to libraries. The group’s visits to glamour spots such as the Apple store in Regent Street and Jamie Oliver’s Recipease have been criticised by library insiders, who questioned why they failed to visit a single celebrated library.
The focus group spent only one day interviewing librarians, users and non-library users, and were told to use open-ended questions such as “what do you think when you hear the word library?”, and “tell us about the last time you visited a library”.
The team later moved on to “synthesis,” the point where all the pieces are put together and solutions are hammered out.
It was described by IDEO as the moment in the brainstorming process “where the magic happens”.
One of the ideas created by the team that appears to have won favour with Camden’s library chiefs is introducing a “host” in libraries.
“The host would welcome you into a lively entrance space where you could use your wi-fi, browse the top 10 library loans, have a cup of coffee and the read the paper,” another entry said.
Pop-up libraries in shopping centres was another suggestion mooted, along with the idea to separate a library into “headspace” – where readers could go for a quiet moment – alongside areas set aside for louder parties, identified as “group space” and “family space”.
And in a final entry another member of the brainstorming team said: “If you look closely, you’ll see that we found it ‘experimental and dynamic’!” |
 |
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
