Day 1 of PLA Results BootCamp 4 is over.

We started talking strategic planning today. I was pleased. From the first moment it was about truly assessing user needs and not just kind of making up user needs as they fit librarians’ perceptions of them. This “reality check” seems to be at the heart of Nelson and Garcia’s method; they have created a strategic planning methodology that is intended to work as an idiotproof piece of user-centered design. Take the philosophy that popularized with 1990s interaction design, substitute in the word “community” for the word “user”, consider a complex service ecology of stakeholders ranging from trustees to homeless folks sleeping at the library, use that image to replace Donald Norman’s teapot, and you’ve got a match. Hm. That was a long sentence. Still, you come to the same conclusion: user-driven design principles that were adopted by late 90s web designers but born of mid-20th century ergonomics seem to have crept their way into the way we plan and go about business at the library. Would Nelson and Garcia say that design is the future of (library) business?

Maybe I’ll be able to answer that question with a feeling of certainty by the end of the week, but for now I believe it is a sound assertion. Before anyone says I’m wrong, consider one of the eighteen potential Library Service Responses they define; this is one of the newer responses that is meant to address contemporary concerns associated with “library 2.0″.

Express Creativity: Create and Share Content

Residents will have the services and support they need to express themselves by creating original print, video, audio, or visual content in a real-world or online environment.

Stay tuned, its gonna be a great week!