 Good morning. We're going to go ahead and get started since we heard that the sounds of CNI Welcoming us to start our session My name is Larry Alexander. I'm the associate university librarian for learning and teaching at the University of Michigan And this is my colleague Justin Schell who is a learning design specialist And we wanted to let you know that today's session is recording is being recorded Which is why we're kind of bound to the capturing system. So So welcome everyone This morning Justin and I are going to really focus on our recent work with our design labs The notion of a design lab is not particularly new to us We've had one on our North campus in our digital media commons for many years Which really focuses in on a certain set of disciplines. So the engineering schools up there are in architecture music and Art and design so many of the making communities we've had this design lab in our Digital media commons that has really worked to partner with those different disciplines And we've learned a lot from that lab and it's really served as an example for how we can take an active role in Extending learning experiences beyond the classroom Both in terms of online things that we can do technology things we can do but also real world types of Activities and that the design labs in particular have a real focus in on student learning So we've seen a real increase in the need for students to have Opportunities to be immersed in environments that build skills that build specific knowledges But also we have really gotten many more demands and requests to have different types of activities and support and engagement Around how to help students function in society to function in their careers to function in things that require skills like teamwork collaboration innovative learning Leadership qualities and to have environments that help them learn how to have those skill sets in fluid environments and to be very fluid So about two years ago. We asked ourselves How can we extend and apply this mode this? Model this notion of a design lab, but apply it to different disciplines So how might we apply it to the humanities the social sciences and the sciences did it make sense? Would it translate what wouldn't translate? Can we open further possibilities About how these disciplines as they are looking at increasingly adding peer collaborative learning into their Curriculum and into their work. How can we actually think about how the design lab might help support that transition? And is there a way that the library specifically can further meet? Both some of the unmet needs around expertise that's needed to help with this and also to leverage new approaches to Scholarship as they're being created So to that end two years ago We proposed to our provost to launch a design lab on our central campus in our Shapiro library to explore these questions So success with our design lab on our north campus around a set of disciplines How might we translate that to our central campus around a new set of disciplines? So Justin and I today are going to talk about our journey that we've taken to date To move the Shapiro design lab from a notion to a question to reality And we're going to dive into concepts like iterative learning design creativity Knowledge creation interdisciplinarity connected learning and we'll share both our highs and lows as we've kind of worked through these different issues And most importantly we want to leave time at the end for conversation with all of you about what you're seeing How this fits or doesn't fit with your campus and kind of share some lessons learned. I should also mention This is our our mascot that Justin designed our our design lab So that we did on a 3d printer. So it's kind of a fun a fun approach to that so before we Get started we wanted to take a few moments Can you move forward to the next slide? To look at a few images and ask ourselves the question what kind of learning Takes place and we just ran we went out and picked some pictures We want to spend some time thinking about what kind of learning does this space enable and we had an Interactive session prepared where you were going to be able to log in and add your thoughts to this But the Wi-Fi is not working. So we're going to do we're going to go to plan B Which is for people just to yell out their answers old-fashioned talking old-fashioned talking So what kinds of learning does this space enable thoughts? Collaboration brainstorming partner. Yep Okay Loud good That's true. That's true. What kind of space does this enable for learn what kind of learning happens here Sandbox creation teamwork. What's the role of technology in that space? Flexible great next month. How about this space? individual presentation Interactive I heard People from Indiana here or is anyone from Indiana here who recognizes what this is This cruiser is funky. What about this? practical teamwork Real-world perhaps some sort of Mentoring might be going on in there in our last space What might be happening here? casual hangout Transition and yet the students are actually adapting it for other purposes, right? Right visibility. Yes, so it's transparent what people are doing in that space, right? So we spent a lot of time as we were thinking about The Shapiro design lab around this question of what concept should be at the forefront of our thinking when developing spaces that Facilitate partnership models that facilitate collaboration that facilitate coming here learning those types of things and we Looked at different places. We talked with different people. We looked at our design lab on North campus Have lots of discussions about that and what we came to is in our first iteration is That the idea that we have an answer for the moment Right and that we're actually okay that this space is going to evolve and continue to grow and change So at the moment, we think a lot about digital scholarship and by that we in many ways are asking the questions around What are the capabilities needed to support scholarship in a digital error, right? So what are they some of them might be analog actually and some of them might actually be technical capabilities? We talked a lot about the residential experience. So what? Given all the affordances of online learning What is the unique role right now that the residential experience could serve as a differentiator to learning? We talked a lot about collaboration It's showing up in lots of places in lots of different ways So how are we going to support it a certain type of collaboration or clap? You know collaboration with a small C a big C a specific disciplines. How do they all look at that differently? Expertise what expertise does the library currently have how might we map that differently? Into the conversation and what expertise do we not have that we need to go get? This whole idea of iterative How do we actually set it up so that this service this program is by its very nature? Going to going to have a mandate to grow and continue to a change in and adapt How can it be a place of incubation? How can it really take advantage of the notion of peer-to-peer learning that's something we say a lot But what does that actually mean and finally this notion of how can we? provide Both the space expertise and partnership that really helps as our campus is trying to think about extending learning beyond the classroom So before we kind of jump into what we've done with the Shapiro design lab I thought I'd share three concepts from our North Campus design lab that had really informed our thinking as we've been thinking about Our new design lab so this these are all from our digital media comments And I thought I'd take three concepts the first one being around open pedagogy So and use real-life examples to show what we mean by that so the design lab is uniquely It's not reservable for an exclusive use right and it's intentional in that It actually wants to have multiple activities happening at the same time So even where there might be a lab going on like you can see in the front of the picture on the right there's also some activity and some other work going on simultaneously in a different part of the room and The example I've used is to comey Ogata who's the student there. He built this sound tunnel For a performing arts technology to 52 interaction design class he was in the design lab working on it and The whole point of that instrument that he was building was it's a way to use wind to control feedback And excite resident frequencies through the pipes. Well, he was working on that a different faculty member came in for a different purposes So professor David Chung he's in art and design and he saw him and said wait a minute There's a link to what he's doing to a course I'm teaching on in the studio 4d class and he invited that student to come in to actually set the stage for the next set of Areas of study that they were going to do around a unit basically around sound and so that's a great example of how The expert in this case is a student from a different Setting coming into another class to become the expert to launch a discussion about a new topic in a course So that's what we mean by open pedagogy It's it's there's a benefit to people seeing what they're doing and being able to translate that from one space to another The next Example is around student leadership. So Connor Berry was a student His thesis research explored the emotional potential of asynchronous audio Communication But while he was using the design lab for his coursework He became really interested in the idea of community, right? And how you could actually bring together different communities together to work on particular topics so he created a ad hoc academic group called the electronic lunch and it meets once a month in the design lab it brings members from the University community as well as the Michigan community of the the local community and Even from as far as from Detroit that people come and they do different topics They they try different things if we had the ability to for you to actually hear the audio I was going to show you the clip of him talking about his work But in that clip he is talking about the use of Lumen bots and how they attached that Concept and hosted workshops for people to learn how to use that and they applied it into a local Parade that happens in Ann Arbor once a year called the Fool's Day parade and so it's a great example of Student leadership of having an idea bringing people together Having the space and the support in order to do that and then making an impact back out into the into the community and Then the third example is about student research itself. So this is Robert Alexander He recently recedes his PhD in design science, but he started as an undergraduate And has had many roles in the design lab when he first started as an undergraduate He was a student then he was a collaborator then he was a mentor then he started to host workshops He became a leader performer a director a researcher and this was all through his undergraduate master's in PhD work He really found a home in the design lab of that being a place where he could do his different work and The the clip that we would have shown here is him talking about The work that he did With NASA around sound and how he was actually able to use the tech the tools available In our digital media commons in the space of the design lab to make that come forward So I think what we what we realized is that we have found ourselves at this kind of crossroads between the notion of Engaged learning and digital scholarship And we've really asked ourselves how do libraries fit into this scenario this trend of learning by doing? How do we offer space expertise and innovation as a way to have connected experiences? And most importantly, how are we helping students ask questions like who am I what am I passionate about? What's possible and that this kind of space this kind of service this kind of program helps them do that? And I think that it's really interesting if you step back and think about libraries This is historically being the place where this iterative you're gonna you need to find information You're gonna go find it. Oh wait, you can't do it You're gonna have some stumbling blocks along the way And you're gonna keep iterating until you find the information and this is a new expression of that So we really really have embraced this notion as we think about our design labs And so as I shared we went to our provost two years ago and we made a funding request We made we asked for money for a position for the design lab, which has manifested in Justin We asked for hourly funds and actually a relatively significant portion of hourly funds for the library From a library's perspective because we knew peer learning was going to be really key to this And we wanted to have the student budget to actually Have students be intricately part of building the design lab and delivering the services of it And we also asked for an operating budget and luckily she said yes. And so now So now just is going to talk about what we've done with the Shapiro design lab itself. Thanks Larry Oh, yeah, so I started at Michigan about four and a half months ago So this is a four and a half month report The design lab so this is what we started with this is about a thousand or so square feet total This is in the as of the Shapiro undergrad library, which is a high-traffic 24-7 space There is a space called the tech tech which was a closed off Sort of tech support computer lab and had a poster printer in there over there that was Very problematic in that it needed to always be supervised and so if it wasn't supervised the space was locked And so there's really lovely space that no one was using and so we eventually tore down that wall and moved it over to the side and now we have this large open space to play with You can see some of our early paint choices and things like that So, you know building this space from the ground up essentially has offered us a lot of opportunities and a lot of challenges One of the one of the great benefits was that you know, we have the digital media commons on North campus Which includes a 3d lab Media conversion center, and so we don't need to do all the things in the design and we can be Not much choosy, but we can say okay. Well, they do that up there Let's talk about one aspect of the project and so we don't need to replicate the different spaces But there's also sort of structural Limitations as we can't solder in there because there's not good enough ventilation or things like that So we've been working through the challenges inherent in this kind of space as well as the opportunities that it provides so we've been working through three themes that have guided what I've called designing the design lab and the first one is as collaborative and community and Taking from my friend Stuart Barnard's idea of the community garden as this really wonderful notion of the space Where going back to our partnership model, this isn't a production house This is a project design project incubation space. So if someone is coming in They're there to learn something and to participate in this community and not just say hey, I've got this idea go build this for me But also it's the idea that incorporating participatory design in the space itself That could be with butcher paper on the walls. It could be you know online surveys one of the things about this space is that from where that that first image was taken is usually filled with undergrads and How how can we engage them with the design of that space? How could we have them teach workshops much like Takumi did in that earlier example that Laurie shared It's also not just a space for people to use there's got to be some level of partnership involved with it We have actually I think in about an hour There's an event going on in the lab and and they just emailed me yesterday said hey There's gonna be students studying there. What should we do? Move around and engage the students perhaps So, you know, you don't have the space just to yourself and so as Laurie mentioned we did have funds for student workers. We've hired 12 student workers for Staffing the lab, which they have a range of backgrounds from architecture graphic design web design computer science And you know, so they spent these last three months or so working on internal library projects It's just sort of demonstrate because this also is an internal library lab space And how can we encourage people within the library to think about different things? So we're working on a Twitter bop for special collections or working on an awesome box Working on some visualization with publishing But how can we encourage people and have people who have expertise in these different areas be guides for? So that we're having lots of pop-up workshops in the space. I did two last week on Transcription and multi-multi-scholarship. We have one Thursday with a letterpress, which I'll talk about more in a minute And again, we're hoping to have some students teach these workshops as well from this basically, you know What do you want to teach? What do you want to learn? Let's make that happen You mentioned as well the iteration experimentation. This is a you know, I think a hallmark of Anything worthy calling worthy of calling itself a design lab The M for this space the design is project design and it's thinking through these different Facets of a project trying to get there very early in the process to think through not just the technical aspects But the methodological aspects the ethical aspects So we've had a lot of people come in and talk about social media collection and archiving and analysis And so, you know, we can talk about the technical things. Yeah, here's a Python script or twerk, etc But let's talk about where the things are stored Are you going to be using these can these things be traced back to individual people and Laying that out in conjunction with them So they have a strong foundation to go on in this work in the previous work as a clear fellow at Minnesota the biggest thing that people People were presenting was that they didn't really know how to get started They knew sort of what they wanted to do But they didn't know sort of the past that you take and this the sort of developing these pathways developing these workflows has been You know, I think successful in the project we worked on so far and I think is going to be a key element with the design lab We're also trying to Think about how we do this in the space. It's of how do we convey this in the space itself? And so we're looking at a design competition Where people can design their own furniture for the lab So if you have a prototype prototype for a chair will give you a fabrication budget and materials budget to try it out In the space or a design gallery We have these 16 windows that are part of those walls in which means we have 32 surfaces to play with what can we put on there? and Also, you know, we mentioned the digital scholarship and this isn't necessarily limited to the digital This goes you know throughout what it means to be scholar what it means to be community engaged learning In a lot of different ways. So we have our partnerships with the Detroit Center With different Ann Arbor community folks and so this is these are you know, sort of laying the foundation now for this One project particularly that I think illustrates this really well is a project with Wolverine press Which has graciously let us use the Challenger proof press on the left from somewhere in the 19th century from upstate, New York we it still has the spider egg sacks to prove it and and So we're working with Fritz Swanson who runs that and Rebecca Chung who's a school of information graduate student on being able to 3d print illustration blocks and eventually type to used on the letterpress and We are right now where we're looking through we figured out how to make 3d file from from a scan of a text so an association with Shakespeare's first folio and Now we're looking at the different materials that can be used to print because we have we have this right now See up there, but that will get crushed by the Cast iron and steel rolling pin. That's about 40 pounds And so trying to figure out what level of really super expensive material that we can use to have it not get crushed But still have the detail needed As compared to something like you know acid etched Illustration blocks and things like that that they use so we have our first workshop on this on Thursday and Finally accessibility and I'm using this term broadly and specifically For me it's providing access in a sort of welcoming environment For things that people want to try out But don't know where to get started just people who are game to try and explore stuff People have come in Asking how to do that how to do something like cool. Let's figure it out I think that's that's the sort of environment that we want we want to to know We're still working on getting the folks who are right next door to us in the The open sort of study areas to come in and work on that so a lot of it has been the sort of parallel track of We have people where we're connecting with campus partners And we're working with researchers and graduate students and faculty and staff who are doing things I welcomed into the design lab and then they're also trying to figure out how we do this with the space itself So we're Offering these away, but we're also incorporating accessibility into the very fabric of the lab I have a fair amount of background in doing this as a filmmaker and media producer and the photo on the left is a very poor quality photo Because I almost forgot to take a picture of it It's a GoPro attached to a wheelchair with various devices and we're I was working at a movement rehabilitation center and doing video production with iPads and GoPro's and so thinking about How we can incorporate work like that into the lab We're working with a number of accessibility specialists to again very early on in the project talk about how you would make this successful, but less so you know as Requirement or compliance there's been a theme and a number of of talks in this thing, but not just making this about compliance There was a there was a professor Sylvester read and and the accessibility statement read as required by law these things are available and Good, we don't think and so we talked about how You know say if you do this in an audio format instead of a paper What creative opportunities does that enable rather than you know, oh you make this an audio format So this person can could understand it and so thinking you know combining this with things like multimodal or multimedia scholarship and being able to To expand what's possible with this We're also working on things like tactile maps for the space and topographical maps with 3d printer and so Just thinking through a lot of the different possibilities that we can do With a space like this with some of the technology have but also with You know a commitment to accessibility as part of this but also another example of Going back to the first definition of accessibility Is a really an emphasis on citizen science in the lab and this is a nice complement to what I see as the library's Engagements with this the scientific process So whether it's collection development research data management teaching in classes And so I've worked for the last couple years with Zooniverse the citizen science outfit based at the other planetarium and Oxford and the Folger and a number of other places and They do crowdsourced Analysis of scientific data you can count penguins and and transcribe Shakespeare and things like that But engaging people with the scientific process and so being able to have you know These projects up on up on touch screens revealed engage with but also work on data gathering and collection air quality monitoring Water quality monitoring. We have a wonderful public library that has data sense data sensors that you can check out and so being able to incorporate This aspect of the scientific process into the lab into these kinds of spaces and perhaps then Into sort of the real-world learning or a different path and they might have thought of earlier before they before engaging with this So we'd love to show you more pictures of what the lab looks like But it's still a work in progress things like furniture delays and Sign shops and things like that so furniture ordered in August still not here yet So we we have this really nice design on the wall and we chose colors. Isn't it beautiful? It's gonna say design lab there Sometime soon. We are currently investing in a vinyl cutter so we can make our own signs And we you know, we have whiteboards up the the tables there We were gonna put wheels on them and steel case took a month to say they don't make wheels for those tables So we are figuring out what we're gonna do with those But a lot of these, you know these things are as as Laurie said constantly iterating And I don't ever want to get to a space where I could say like here's the design lab because it would be here's the design lab today We've had conversation with people saying hey, there's this table over here. Do you want that back? No, that's where it should be so so I think as you know, these are These are the answers that we've come up with so far and So returning back to this question What concepts should be at the forefront of our thinking when developing spaces that facilitate partnership models? And we'd love to hear what you think of our answer and what How you've answered that question and just generally engage you with with some conversation Well, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it. Thanks