Two things crossed my desk this week that have been do-si-do’ing in my head. After a few years of seeing my information literacy work in one silo, my maker work in another, and my role as an instructor of contextual inquiry in a third, I’m just starting to explore the connections between them.
How does traditional research inform making?Does it help people know about and build on what’s already been created? Or would it be more rewarding to design something even if it already exists elsewhere else?
How does prior research impact qualitative interviews in the IDEO/design thinking/human-centered design/contextual design method. Does it give better information that leads to more knowledgable interview protocols or introduce biases that bleed into and impact interview answers?
Here are the this week’s additions to my thinking:
1. Purdue University’s Integrating Information into the Engineering Design Process, available as a free download or bound print volume.
“Integrating Information into the Engineering Design Process” by Michael Fosmire and David Radcliffe via kwout
From the Preface (Fosmire & Radcliffe 2014, ix):
Both engineering educators and librarians understand that novice engineering students tend to make quick decisions about what approach to take to solve a problem, then spend a lot of time develop- ing prototypes and finishing details, when they might have saved a lot of effort and created a superior outcome had they spent more time upfront attempting to understand the problem more fully and thinking more broadly about potential solutions before actually working to implement one.
Furthermore, many engineering students seem to believe that everything needs to be done from first principles. They waste an inordinate amount of time trying to redesign a widget that is already cheaply and readily avail- able commercially, and often spend months designing a new device, only to find out that something remarkably similar had already been patented years ago. This well-intentioned but wasted effort can be mitigated by helping engineering students adopt a more informed approach to engineering design. To date there has not been a systematic effort to develop such a model that resonates with both engineers and librarians. This book was conceived to meet that need.
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What interests me about this is that there’s a tension here I can’t wait to explore. On one hand, we are building most library makerspaces around the idea of naive tinkering: just having fun exploring. Yet at the same time, for makerspaces to truly impact communities, tinkering isn’t enough. Moving to solutions — whether they be for personal, societal, or commerical use — is where the impact comes. And that means balancing tinkering time with the pragmatic need to build on what’s gone before, right?
2. A design charette about Ebola in this video from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design:
Addressing Ebola Through Design from UM Stamps School of Art & Design on Vimeo.
In this video — the length of which made me groan when I first opened the link and then made me realize the power of having extended coverage — we see people grappling with the real facts of Ebola transmission, clean-up, and prevention. They’re not just randomly tinkering around — they must design around what is known about the perniciousness of the disease. Research makes better designs. There’s still tinkering, but it’s grounded.
This pushme-pullyou strikes me as something worth tussling with. Maybe there’s a way to bridge these library-based silos. Maybe making and research should be more — not less — closely tied in library-based makerspaces?