Upon returning from their service safaris, everyone came into the studio and using white board markers and sticky notes, threw all the information they gathered up on some whiteboards. The goal here was to make all the information available to everyone as a larger studio research team.

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After everyone was set, all the teams took it in turns to introduce and explain their findings to the rest of the class.

I don’t know about anyone else, but the disparity between the various group’s findings, given that all the groups visited libraries, was eye-opening for me. Sure, there were always going to be similarities in how the books were referenced or the checking in/out procedures etc., but the behaviours, atmospheres, attitudes and facilities available at, for instance a college library, compared to some of the smaller public ones, varied wildly in some cases.

That’s not to say that that is a bad thing. On the contrary, not only is it great that there’s evidently a library for people from every imaginable background, it meant that the next phase of research and development for service design was interesting and appealing. There were so many options for what aspects of libraries we could focus on.

From the outset I was particularly interested in the smaller community-based libraries, like the one in Drumcondra. I liked the idea of designing something helpful or useful not only for the library itself, but of the loyal members who use the library as a social hub.

Luckily, my teammate, Colm shared my interest in this sort of library.

Otherwise, things could have gotten messy.