Anyone interested in conducting ethnographic studies in libraries may be interested in what I learned on the recent San Francisco trip. Among other activities, I had arranged to visit IDEO for a tour with Scott Underwood, long at IDEO and an excellent guide. I had told Scott that the reason for my visit was to see what IDEO might be doing that I could grab and apply to our studies of faculty member and student work practices and technology and space needs here at the University of Rochester.
IDEO (http://www.ideo.com) is a company that started in Palo Alto, California, and maintains its headquarters there, with branches worldwide. It provides a means for other companies and organizations to tap into the creative well. They do this by helping other companies and organizations understand people’s needs and then come up with innovative designs for meeting those needs in creative ways. They also help their clients achieve greater creativity and flexibility in the workplace so that innovation is more a way of work, rather than something special that just happens when IDEO is present.
If you want to know what IDEO does, you can…
View the Nightline program about IDEO’s redesign of the shopping cart (http://www.ideo.com/media/nightline.asp)
Read The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley (http://semcoop.booksense.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct&isbn=038...)
See “IDEO PROTOTYPES THE FUTURE” at the Palo Alto Art Center (http://www.paacf.org/WhatWeAreDoing/Communications/index.html)
Or just browse the IDEO website where there’s lots of information.
I was gratified to learn that much of what we do here at the University of Rochester is similar to what they do at IDEO. We put more emphasis on work-practice study. They put more emphasis on prototyping. Many of our methods are similar.
I was also relieved to find out that some of the parts of our process that seemed a bit clugy to me are actually similar to the way they do things at IDEO. To me that means that we’re probably doing a pretty good job.
And I got some new insights, such as the practice of studying analogous processes as part of design. We have studied analogous websites, but studying analogous processes (such as looking at blood banks when studying supply chains, as Scott mentioned in his example) was new to me, and a great idea.
Many thanks to IDEO for allowing me to visit. And I recommend that anyone who wants to do ethnographic research in libraries and higher education read an IDEO book, visit the exhibit, get the video, check out the website, or otherwise learn what this innovative outfit is doing.