NextGen: All Work and No Play?

Librarians are unrepentant copycats. In our ongoing search for identity as a discipline, we have looked to big business for management and marketing practices, to law and education for models of professional licensure, and even to computer science, going so far as to embed some of our best schools within larger technology departments, seemingly for no better reason than that they deal with information, too.

Though librarians do market and manage, handle contracts and copyright issues, instruct on information literacy, and even build databases and web sites, this hardly makes us executives, attorneys, teachers, or programmers. In fact, most of us likely became librarians to avoid becoming any of those other things. Yet, for some reason, we persist in looking elsewhere for templates that will make our work better or easier. If we are going to look beyond librarianship for a professional model, we owe it to ourselves to study a discipline more akin to ours: design.

At our core, librarians are designers. We may not think of ourselves that way, but, nonetheless, we design. We design information. We design services. We design spaces. Many of us even design graphical displays, such as signage and exhibit cases and web pages. I do not suggest all of us—perhaps any of us—do it well. But we are asked to do it anyway, and in a very real sense we are asked to be the most versatile of designers, switching constantly among media and purposes.

The key difference between design and librarianship is a sense of whimsy and play. I think you know which profession embraces those values and which does not. Designers are taught to approach every problem with a sense of play. With practice, that sense of play eventually becomes for them a technique, a method, an instrument at their disposal. For design professionals, play is a legitimate form of work.

Consider any object you think particularly well designed, and it's likely to exude a sense of playfulness. For instance, take the current rock star of design, the iPod. As a physical object, the iPod begs to be fondled. It then rewards touch by responding with an intuitive interface that one can easily learn by using. Most important, the iPod is designed to be an anticipatory technology. In other words, it creates the need it fills, anticipating change by creating the need for change.

More playful techniques such as role-playing, mapping storyboards, creating visual collages, and writing personas may seem unscientific and hard to justify, but for librarians these methods can be powerful tools to study users and conceptualize and develop new services and programs.

Within the context of libraries, fundraising has inspired some of the most design-worthy ideas. “A Literary Feast,” for example, is a highly successful event organized by the Capitol Hill Community Foundation for the Washington, DC–based School Libraries Project. Each year, volunteer hosts throw 25 book-themed dinner parties in their homes for which guests pay between $75 and $1000—the latter category entitling donors to call themselves “librarians.”

Or, how about the hotline the Vienna, Austria, municipal government launched in support of the city's main library. For .39 Euros per minute, callers are treated to a famous Austrian actress reading passages from Victorian erotica. These fundraising ideas exhibit two common elements: a sense of play and a sense of what their audiences respond to. A Literary Feast harnesses the wealth of a community for a good cause by giving its members a reason to do what they do best: have dinner parties. The Viennese program, meanwhile, bursts some stereotypes, feeds some fantasies, and enables hundreds of journalists to make ham-handed references to a new kind of whispering in the library, garnering priceless publicity.

Approaching our everyday jobs and services with a little playfulness could help all of us design scenarios and techniques that help us in visualizing otherwise unforeseen problems and exploring untested solutions. By infusing our work with the principles of design, we might finally stop worrying if Google is a threat and start figuring out ways both we and our patrons can use it better. Or, we might simply outflank Google by doing things it will never be able to do.

By embracing play, librarians can learn to anticipate new technologies better and maybe even become disruptive technologies in our own right. We have nothing to lose, other than the tired methods of fields we don't inhabit. Besides, what has our focus on other disciplines and professions wrought thus far? If the blogosphere is any indication, a Repressed Librarian, a Bitter Librarian, an Annoyed Librarian, and the Effing Librarian. Isn't it time for a Playful Librarian?