And I'm going to actually move us over to the deck and get our recordings started here, and I'm going to welcome our first presenter for the day, which is so great to have Margaret Sullivan here from Margaret Sullivan Studio thank you for all your great work and bringing this webinar to the WebJunction community.
>> Happy to be here, thank you all for the opportunity.
How is everybody feeling today?
I hope the weather is well where you are, or manageable.
I know all of us are getting hit by different kind of Arctic breezes.
Say hello to each other in the chat, let us know how everybody is feeling.
But we're just so delighted to have you join us this afternoon, some of you all know we're probably part of attended the first session, some of you all probably weren't part of the first session, and that's no worries, we're going to get you up to speed pretty quickly.
But my team, Margaret Sullivan  Studio and the team at Harmonic Design Have Been working collaboratively with the real stars of today's session, Margaret from Altadena, Jaime from Pierce county, so we're going to take you on a journal briefly in the first part, and then the stars are going to tell you all their experience with the application of service design.
Patrick and I have been working together for seven years.
Our journey starts with a story.
So let -- humor us and let us tell you our story and how we all got together today to be webinarring together with you all.
Patrick and I met seven years ago, Melanie Huggi ns, she's the TLA president-elect coming up, brought us together to assist her and her super talented  richland Library team to reimagine services, programs, and their 12 library facilities on the heels of their community passing a $59 million bond referendum.
I had just launched my own firm that I had spent 15 years in architecture and interior design with a real interest in passion on continuing and growing my skill set to design experiences to foster learning, to foster community engagement, to foster community experiences, and with that meeting Patrick swoos fabulous because he had been spending a career in user experience design, but really focusing on developing a set of tools to create services and organizations to foster awesome experiences.
So I have been dabbling in what we call human-centered design and service design with intuition, and I say that because you all are in dabbling in service design and  human-centered design with intuition.
And by meeting Patrick and  learning that there was a whole profession around this, it enabled us to grow our skill set to be very impactful for  creating awesome spaces, awesome services, and awesome strategies that will -- that has enabled us to work all over the country and help you all grow your strength and your impact for your  services.
So when the pandemic hit, we had been in talks with the WebJunction folks around how can we take a webinar, which can really reach a large audience, and use this platform to introduce you all to those tools and techniques so that you all could quickly and efficiently use the human-centered design process to create innovative solutions at a time in our lifetime that is certainly unprecedented.
So what we decided to do was instead of doing a  traditional -- I'm going to go to the next slide -- instead of doing a traditional webinar, we would do a two-part webinar that would be book-ended with some case study group session work with the folks that we introduced you to earlier.
So that in the second session you could hear their stories, how they used the service design techniques, so that it would be much more relatable and  meaningful to y'alls work, hearing how the application works for your peers.
So just briefly, what is service design?
Service design -- and Patrick, he can chat, I'm taking on the role of Patrick, what we've learned from Patrick as we've understood what the industry of service design is and how it is useful for us, is that libraries are in the business of creating services.
So I know some of you all have probably heard design thinking, but what service design does is it creates a holistic approach that takes elements for any number of methodologies, systems thinking, organizational culture and capabilities, change management, human-centered design, to really enable a rigorous methodical approach to building better services and I'm proved services that meet the needs of the human condition.
And so it is inherently human centered, it centers individuals while putting the focus and the storytelling on the protagonist, meeting the needs, challenges, aspirations of the community members that you serve.
It is both the term covalue and cocreated really means that the work that you do is collaborative to build better systems together, which  inherently makes your work more impactful and effective when implementing.
And it is orchestrated and holistic, meaning that it thinks about the big picture story, in particular in work with libraries, you all have your patrons and your customers and your community members with you from cradle to grave.
So really thinking about the life journey that your community members enjoy with you.
It also focuses on understanding the needs of all of us, so Patrick will often say, you  know, front of house is the community or the customers that we're serving and back of house is our employees and our staff.
And so in service design is  really focusing on improving the quality and the experience of all participants that are part of the experience.
How many of you all would agree with this statement -- people are complex.
Our service design acknowledges that when you're in the business -- when you're in the people business, it's a very multidimensional experience that addresses meeting the -- functional needs, their emotional needs, and their social and how they relate in their relationships with other folks.
And so what service design does is it really allows us to -- the word unpack is -- couldn't be overused.
But it allows us to really unpack and look more deeply at what -- and ask the question what are these needs of the individuals that we're meeting at that moment.
So we can customize and create a meaningful experience.
We often use this construct and this structure when we think about the individuals we're serving, and this is a young twhoom we created as a user, the Las Vegas Clark County Library who loved the magician she saw at performance one day, and she was feeling like she wanted to learn how to be a fabulous magician, and then she thought, what if I perform at the library and have a magic program?
So this is one construct.
The other thing about service design is it looks at the experience across time.
That could be throughout the  day, that could be throughout the year, but really thinking about this young woman that before she came to the library, she researched magicians on the web, while she was at the library she was able to tinker with magic tricks in the tinker lab, she was able to get into YouTube videos and then afterwards she was able to bring home collections and materials so that she could practice her becoming a magician at home.
And it really focuses on intentionality, and knowing that every moment that we create in the library experience for our customers and our patrons is going to matter, and therefore we want the environments to be magical and wonderful and supportive.
So now is the time when you all can celebrate what you've been doing during the pandemic.
So what have been some of the most -- use the chat to celebrate, what are some of the most awesome experiences you've been creating for your customers in this time of forced innovation?
Some of my favorite are puppet trucking with Mr. B, hi, Pam will from BrBrentwood.
Let me tell you, the take and makes, I've been loving seeing all the take and makes y'all have been doing.
Oh, drive huff through winter reading, that sounds great.
You could have a 24-hour library from now until turn TIFF.
Pop-up outdoor libraries, that sounds fun.
The virtual singing lessons, that's great.
I haven't heard that yet.
One much my favorite experiences with my son when he was in kindergarten is we did a kindergarten hootenanny.
It was so great to sing  together.
>> A reminder to folks, keep your ideas come than in the  chat.
It will be a resource.
This is a great brainstorm here.
>> I just, some of the ones that I just wanted to highlight some of the ones that we've gotten excited about.
Anything library has been  sending kindness postcards to their community members.
And I think if I'm not mistaken, and some of you in the session might know better than I, I think they just launched a  kindness telephone call project.
There's certainly nothing more than we need right now than  kindness and graciousness with each other.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I saw the richland  Library was now doing  contactless check-outs that you can download a QR code and check out your materials just via your phone, which is going to be great.
And then so many of you all, Denver Public, Multnomah County, Portland Public Library, and some of you are doing this as well, getting things outside, activating the library experience outside, Margaret Sullivan Studio has been working with the Delaware Library to do an outdoor place making starter tool kit.
We're happy to tell you more about that too.
But just this is going to be something that is going to improve, it's going to stay around I think and improve just demonstrating to folks outside the great offerings  that the public libraries provide.
That libraries provide.
Some of you aren't public libraries.
So I wanted to just very briefly use this diagram to demonstrate what you'll be learning today.
The work that we -- the workshops we did with the groups was around problem framing,  really knowing and obsessing with your customer.
Identifying opportunities by framing the question as how might we, better serve our community members.
And then defining and articulating experience principles, and then getting into concepted idea Apples to Apples to envision future experiences.
Now, the next steps of their work after the concept creation will be prototyping and testing, evaluate expg assessing their new services, it rating and refining, and as you see, that process can also be circular.
Until you're ready for the implementation and the continues improvement.
So I wanted to give you that context.
And you're going to hear from Matiass in a second, but basically in a seven easy-step process what the groups did was they first identified a customer patron group that second they articulated how COVID has  impacted their ability to reach this target audience, third, they identified their needs and they did it in a way that was both broad, life needs, and specific library needs.
Fourth, they identified how those needs were being met, unmet, or undermet, and Matias is going to explain that.
And then they got bus and I got to work.
They created their how might we statement, they generated experience principles, and they collaborated and cocreated with covalue their concept.
And integral to their work, and you'll hear more about this too, is really framing the opportunity with the how might we statement.
And it really enables you to take a challenge by often a challenge comes out in a complaint or I can't do this, and in turning the, I wish I could do this better, into how might we meet our seniors during -- who are lonely during COVID more effectively, it automatically opens you up to possibility and opportunity, both in mind-set, framing, and collaborative problem solving.
So with that, I think Matias, you're up.
I hope I've teed you up effectively.
Thank you for letting me explain service design.
That I've learned from y'all with Patrick and Harmonic.
>> Of course.
It was a great introduction.
Thank you, Margaret.
And thank you to all the  libraries who have contributed in the chat.
I've seen a lot of great things being done throughout all the libraries in the U.S.
Here we are now going to do a deep dive into how it was for the design team in Harmonic and Margaret Sullivan Studio to design the activities that we conducted with these three groups of libraries from Altadena, Pierce County library and Prince Georges County  Memorial Library.
Even before we started working with them, these were some of the questions that we were asking our -- basically we  wanted to tab into questions that most libraries and these three libraries that yes going to meet were encountering challenges with, and that was basically how might we create more desirable services and we have seen that some things are being done already by you guys, and all of the libraries in the U.S.
And how are we -- how might we also create more value for people, and so the activities we conducted with the different libraries are wanting to basically extend that, how can we create more value for people, and inspire them.
And also how might we meet the needs of all people who participate in a service?
Basically that is how do we make it known and very relevant for all of our library participants in the workshop that they need to be aware of so many moving parts when it comes to a time of delivering and offering  services.
And also being able to respond to the complex challenges that we are in today, and harnessing the collective creativity that the organization offered.
And with that, I would like to jump into what the process  looked like, and you can see that you all have been present in our process, from the  beginning in the WebJunction number one, as well as right now we're all over to the right in the WebJunction number two.
But all of the time that we have been away from each other we've been working with these three libraries and have gone through three different sessions, the first one you can see is the problem space exploration, that light blue diamond in which we started exploring the problem space that these libraries were situated in.
We started understanding what their context was and their echo system in which we started identifying what the customer types, they were interacting with were, what the customer needs were, and also what the factors influencing the quality and the frequency of their visits, and that allowed us to have a greater understanding that is why that diamond is  getting fatter or bigger in the middle as you can see, that's when we have a lot of more information thanks to all of the discussion that we take and we have with each other, which then allowed us to explore future aspirins, and those are basically these guiding principles that would later help the organization as well as other employees be able to take decisions and as a group and act as one big organization.
Then you can see we had that in between, which was a month-long in between gap between the two sessions.
Which we leveraged and gave some homework to the library participants and encouraged them to keep on working, keep their minds warm, and ready to go for the next session.
Which happened in mid-january.
The solution space exploration which started right out of the bat with the refining and sharing of experience  principles, which led to idea Apples to Apples, and --  so how did this all work?
How did we manage to work together?
So we were in total six designers, you had three  libraries, we separated two designers per library.
Here you can see how Lyna worked with Jeannie, with the Altadena library, explee Margaret worked with Pierce County and Patrick and myself worked with Prince Georges county memorial library.
So How Were We Able to Work?
We Collaborated on Mira,  Which -- Miro, Which Is This online White Boarding Platform Which Allowed Us to Create These Different Activities and Templates as well as the  post-its that you can see behind the text here.
And we were able to communicate with each other while the designers and the activities led the Miro collaboration, and basically moved things around and filled in with the post-its with notes that the library participants were saying and speaking about.
So here let's take a deeper dive into the first session.
The problem space exploration.
And we started, as I said, understanding the context.
And in the image behind the text you can see how we started exploring how this different types of customer types had changed and how they were initially prior to COVID, and now during COVID.
And we started examining how these relationships changed and we did this in order to create that awareness in our library participants and that visual aspect which sometimes goes very long way to create impact, because sometimes we don't notice, but as you can see in this image A. lot of these customers or customer types that were a highly interacting before COVID, were now very low to having none interaction with the library due to COVID or maybe other factors.
But just taking a moment and acknowledging that is very beneficial.
Then we jumped into Peyton Manning thiedzing with our customers.
How can we get into the -- we chose some customer archetypes or some customer types and explored what their needs were, what factors influenced the frequency and what factors influenced the quality of their visits.
And basically this allowed us to be a little more aware of what their needs were, and what if anything we -- the libraries were doing anything to fulfill the needs, we learned that a lot of needs were being catered to, but some were not, and that is where the opportunities started emerging.
So we identified opportunities based off of the needs that we had analyzed from the previous step that you just saw.
So basically framing the needs or problems as opportunities, allowed the designers and the library participants to see beyond that problem and see what can be done to address that  need.
In case a previous library customer would come in to the library in order to heat up or warm themselves up, now that they are unable to come in or unable to gather in large  masses, how are we going to do it?
How might we offer that same service, which is the service of warming some customers because they are cold on the outside and see the library as a service for warming themselves up.
So the idea there is how can we still create that opportunity, and offer it in different ways.
All of this previous work led to the creation and -- of experienced principles, and as I was saying before, an  experienced principle is basically a set of guidelines that guides an organization and therefore all of its employees with these conexpies memorable phrases that basically inspire and also help the employees take decisions that all the other employees would also take and that are in agreement or go with the vision that the library has for itself.
And this basically eventually also helped us with the ideation aspect of the work shopts, which is coming up next, and also the concept creation.
So all we just saw was the first session that we had, which was a problem space exploration, and now a small deep dive into what happened in between, which was the homework that we designed to the library participants.
We actually encouraged them to keep on working on their experience principles and we gave them a handout which looked like the one behind here in the image, which sequenced dash sequence of steps to follow and some examples there at the bottom right in order to basically show them what a simple and good and memorable experience principle looks like, and sounds like.
And the whole purpose of this is also to keep the participants engaged and also -- and  thinking, because we had to take advantage of this one-month gap period in which maybe a lot of ideas started cooking, and then those ideas or experience principles were sent back to us through email, and those were used in the second session that now we're going to go and deeper dive into the second session, which was the solution intais explore -- space exploration.
In it we started refining the experience principles, right off the bat, some teams had most -- all of the teams shared their work on experienced principles over that break, so whenever they came back the table on the right, you see was already filled in which allowed us to get into more of a refining and into a conversation into how can we make them even better or move on to the ideation.
And for example, here we had experience principles number three, which was meet my neighbors.
And that is an experience principle that would guide employees in a way that whenever a new library customer or maybe even a new library employee or staff joined the community, this library employee would basically present the whole rest of the community as their neighbors, as these people who are close to them, who are there to support them, if they need it, and basically are there for you.
So that is an example of an experience principle that basically helped guide the ideas and concepts according to this specific library's vision.
After that, the experience principles and the how might  we -- from the first session, were used in the ideation session.
Here you can see how the how might we at the top right of your slide, and the experience principle are combined because we were combining these in order to create greater inspiration and greater identification of opportunity, some participants of course always can and did focus on one or the other, because each one of these was supported by all of the previous work that we had done with understanding what the context of the libraries were, understanding what each customer type that we were analyzing, what their needs were, and what needs they had, so these how might wees and the experience principles that were used to ideate and to create the concept on the second session were very much supported by all of that previous work that came from the conversations and from all of the knowledge from the day-to-day of work of our great library participants and the great work that you all do every day.
And so as you can see here on the left, we have this little image of another diamond this, is the second diamond of the initial larger process map that I showed you at the beginning.
And in this diamond we see participants are generating many ideas.
And that is why the arrows are going -- are expanding, the diamond is going towards its larger shape or format, it's  getting fatter, as I like to  say.
It's getting filled with ideas.
So all that diamond is very much filled with ideas from the participants, and we were encouraging the participants to sketch out and to write as  needed and then to send their sketches through email to us.
Which we then uploaded and for that second part of the ideation sessions, in which we basically start -- we uploaded them and we put all the ideas and the images into this -- in Miro, in the white boarding collaborative tool, that allows us to if we move things around and have conversations, and make notes with the post-its, as in order to start to see similar ideas or patterns, across these ideas, and as you can see from the many individual ideas here, we have four larger groups of ideas of CSU terse as we like to call them, and again, to point out the diamond, we had the diamond converge or become smaller going towards its more thin part, because from the many ideas, now we have four, and then this allowed us to prioritize more clearly and basically allowed us to focus on what idea we wanted to develop into a larger more elaborate concept.
These concepts, they will be I think presented by the libraries themselves, but here we have some of the basically what it was like to create the concepts, and we basically wanted the participants to think of many things when developing these, right, first of all who are you designing for?
We started with three to five customer types, but sometimes not all concepts are meant for every actor or every customer that the library has.
In this case you can see in the image that there were three customer types with this specific concept attends to, and in that way we get a little deeper, a little more detailed into what are those needs that the concept is addressing.
And this is important again, we address those in the first session, but here we get more detailed, more conversation, by telling ourselves different experiences or different stories that we have lived through, and basically remembering what it was like for the -- for these customers to experience these needs that we have recognized.
Below it you cannot see it, but I have highlighted it in the little text box there, what are the outcomes?
What are we looking this concept to create?
What are we wanting to help them create or develop their digital literacy, do we want them to be able to print by themselves?
And so how are we doing this?
How does it look like to experience this concept?
How would this service be delivered and also how does it feel for the customer, what are they going to think about it and what do they have to do?
And also an important aspect is to incorporate and think about the employees when you think of developing these concepts, because the concept has to be delivered by the employee.
And they have to be trained and have to feel ready in order to deliver this.
So once we -- the libraries  each, they all developed their own concepts and then we had a share out amongst the three groups of libraries.
And we had some great concepts being shared, and here we have just some highlights of the great things that we saw, and throughout this activity center and throughout the participation we had was that we were able to help or go through this new activity and gain a different perspective on the work that the library participants do, and how they're doing it, because they identified those needs and they identified what things they were already doing, and those things they could do and the ideas, and in the concepts.
Later they were able to immerse themselves into a customer  shoes, which later empowered the library participants to come up with as many of the ideas as possible, as they could have and basically to helpful fill those needs and lastly we saw a great number of topics and conversation and ideas that came out of these two sessions that incredibly was such a short period of time, the actual sessions were short, but so much came out of it.
We were very impressed, we had a great time and hope that all of this was very beneficial for all of the libraries that participated.
>> Thank you.
I just want to jump in and maybe have you answer this one question before we move on to Margaret from Altadena.
During the active meeting sessions, the problem and solution sessions, did the groups meet for a whole day, over a few days, or for limited times?
And then based on your experiences, what would you recommend to enable the best opportunity for groups to think and communicate in terms of  timing and frequency for snows.
>> Yeah.
So for the active meeting sessions, we met for -- there -- the first session, the -- I'll go back -- the first session, the problem space exploration session, we met in a day for three hours.
And basically went through that first half that -- I'll show you the process map real quick.
So that first session problem space exploration, all that occurred in three hours.
And then that in between was on the participants' own time, they had around three weeks to complete it.
And then yes asking for the work they had done for a couple days before that second session in order to get ready.
And then the second solution --
[phone ringing]
Sorry about that.
Sorry.
The second session was also -- in one day and for three hours.
But for that second question, how do basically meet and work together, there is benefits and meeting and working collaboratively, there are also benefits in doing some work separately.
And I would say for whenever you're trying to create a common understanding, like we did at the beginning, it's great to work together and for a couple of hours, we've noticed that things online take a little bit more than they would in person, because of the different things that one has to go through.
And -- but, yeah, a couple  hours, also a way to Corey that it common understanding and leave the meeting with things that you can do in the meantime, because some people work better at different times of the day, and different contexts, and then again, when you're trying to idea yait, ideation is always great to do on your own, but then share those ideas like after the fact, because we had participants ideate on their  own, but then share and have a conversation about them.
>> Excellent.
That's fantastic.
And I think we'll go ahead and move in to these excellent case studies and hear from the libraries themselves, and then we'll collect more questions.
Keep your questions coming in to chat, but Margaret H, welcome.
>> Good afternoon, everybody.
I'm happy to be here and share on behalf of thality Library team.
 tall Deena library teach I'm also joined by Victor, the assistant director for Altadena libraries who can be answering your questions if you post them in the chat room.
So some of the prework that we were tasked to do was a swat analysis or strengths opportunities, weaknesses and threats analysis in order to identify what part of the community we needed to further engage with.
And initially we identified engaging literacy program volunteers, parents and teens, and how to reach them as our main challenge.
But as we worked through the chorus of the service design workshops, we found our audience did broaden.
During our first session, we looked at how COVID has affected those we work with, and how COVID has changed the way we think about serving them.
And we identified those involved with the challenge prior to COVID, and basically saw that all the segmenting of the community were affected from children, to seniors.
We took segments of the population that we identified in our main challenge, parents, teens, children, and tutors, and further examined their needs, factors that influenced frequency of their visits, and factors that influenced the quality of their visits.
For example, for parents, we felt that their needs were free access to wi-fi, social and emotional support, and tbreak their children, transportation and an overwhelming schedule were factors that influenced the frequency of their visits, and the comfort of the space, inconvenient hours, and spaces to disconnect were factors that influenced the quality of their visits.
We created short guiding principles or experience principles, some of these could be applied both to staff as well as the public.
They weren't just one sided, they were more of a give or take experience or transaction.
And looking at the services we provide, we refine these experience principles into  guiding aspirations or themes for our staff as well as the public.
Matias went over our meet my neighbors experience principle, but we also had make it natural, make it personal, and lead by example.
The next step was taking our experienced principles and seek how they related to some of the original, how might we  statements that we generated from our session one, such as how might we provide restorative spaces or experiences for patrons to disconnect or recharge.
Looking at the how might we statements using the variety of experience principles, opened up different pathways to focus and to think about these issues.
Also applying our experienced principles to the how might we statements was helpful in the next stage of ideation or  visioning the principles.
It gave us another way to think about how to achieve these outcomes.
We spent quite some time in this visioning process, literally yes asked to draw up pictures, but as you can see from what we generated, we were more text hitch based, which was totally fine for the visioning process.
After visioning our ideas, they were clustered into like groupings.
And as we worked through these themes, we noticed something that ran throughout.
Which was the concept of disconnecting from technology, self-care, and restoration for the public, but also for our staff.
Our final concept was the service of doing nothing.
Which addresses the need for public and for our staff for a space to disconnect and have introspection and patrons' expectation of a quiet space and place for escape, and meeting our four experience principles.
We know libraries have evolved into very busy places and libraries as quiet places where staff run around shushing  people, it is mostly  unrealistic.
But for us this concept of listening to silence, or appreciating quiet may be a  jumping-off point for us to explore as we contend with the unprecedented adversity of this time in our public library services.
Finally, the -- some of our take-aways that we came away with from our service design experiences was really know your community before prescribing services or implying need,  really learn about who your community members are.
During the last couple months we've created a community asset map and we are planning a new round of community conversations on multiple levels, our last community assessment was in  2019, and we anticipate some changes to that.
Create manageable actions, the exercises we participated in really helped us organize and prioritize the challenges that we came up with.
And expect unexpected results.
The service design process resulted in a concept which speaks to us as a staff as well as to our public.
And we're looking at ways we can lean into the concept of library as a quiet space.
As product of our design service design experience, we've created an organized live Zoom mediation programs open to the public, and while as staff, that will be available for four weeks in  March.
And during this time of COVID, staff are working remotely from home so our leadership team has really focused on building and strengthening a cohesive team and creating opportunities to help us feel connected working on self-care, and wellness, and recognizing that we are all colleagues and human beings trying to help each other through these unprecedented times.
The stronger we are, the more helpful we can be to our community.
So please visit our website, or email us with any additional questions.
And thank you for the opportunity for us to share our experience.
>> Fantastic.
Thank you so much, Margaret.
I see questions coming in, we're going to continue to move through, and then we'll circle back and get to some of those specific questions.
Let's move on over to Jaime from  Pierce County.
>> Thanks so much for having us.
I'm going to do a little bit of storytelling before we get into the experience that we had.
Just before COVID, our library system had concluded a major reorganization of our customer experience, or public services staff.
And one of the aspects that we were intentionally creating jobs and time in those jobs, to do was to really develop more enriched community engagement and community relationships.
So we had kind of crafted this concept of T3, or having staff time through allocated and -- in three different areas related to direct public service to community building, and also in support of our programs and initiatives.
As we know, there's so much work before us as public library staff, and lots of needs to  meet, and how do we tackle all of that.
So with that kind of stage  setting, we were so primed to get into so much work, and then we have COVID that disrupted us, which was just fine, because it's given us a unique opportunity to reimagine our public services, and this opportunity to work with Margaret Sullivan Studio Designs came at the premier time for us.
It's a huge change at our organization, and it really represents how we're connecting, collaborating, and coordinating our services to change most successfully for our customers.
With each of our star, we're playing distinct roles that hadn't previously been defined.
And so we've just started to poke at those and launch them and part of this too was to center our public services around design thinking, and with some service foundations.
To really represent our desired customer experience around being customer centric and sharing that equity, diversity, and inclusion is embedded in all of our work.
That we're continuously improving our processes, and that we're also being really strategic in our innovation.
So kind of getting to the -- our first session for our ideation and customer experience work, I brought together a group of team members two of whom are with us today, Jeffrey and Anna who can answer question in chat, but we wanted to kind of -- we are on this trajectory that's been interrupted, and where are we most apt?
So part of our aims definitely needed to look at how do we untether our services from our physical buildings?
We have 20 physical spaces that were delivering service from across 1800 square miles.
And I think we're really looking at how we show up differently.
And that the traditional  in-branch's destination may not be our leading service mix.
It's getting -- getting reimagined, I guess.
So part of it too and part of our overarching strategy is to serve a priority audience of asset limited individuals in our county.
The working poor, essentially.
And in Pierce County, 37% of our county is not able to meet basic needs like food, housing, child care.
So we have our steering team that is starting to do some  work, and brought together members from the priority audience steering team thinking these principles could kind of spiral in this space and then cascade broader into the rest of our O. and public services work.
As I mentioned, we're  strengthening our vision for partnership and community engagement across multiple job descriptions, and to do that effectively, our -- we really needed and we were attentive through this process about what are the staff supports needed to build confidence, to approach new circumstances where there aren't rule books or guidance, and it's really relationship forward.
So yes also hoping that through this process it kind of would help us narrow the -- transformation is huge and it's hard to conceptualize, but going through these intentional steps of the planning process we were able to really drill in, assess, and discern where the most value is going to be for our  community.
So with discovered the how might wees are really challenging  that.
Was one of the things that surprised me, is kind of getting ourselves out of our own box.
And doing that, we were able to really -- sky's the limit, to be able to imagine things that we never would have considered in r and approaches and feelings that really are representative of the experience that we want our community to have.
So I think the how might wees we have identified, or how might we work with our partners to create stronger emotional connections with our customers, how might we have a presence and be available to our customers in different ways.
How might we empower and train our employees to leverage resources and engage with our customers.
And how might we show up safely in places.
So of course as everyone is experiencing turning back service on in a COVID environment does take that ingenuity, creativity, and a lens of safety for sure.
Where we ended was a concept, we grappled a lot with our experience principles.
And were one of the ones that -- I'm recalling with a lot of delight is that at the aspirationally, as we go through this transformational journey, wouldn't it be amazing if the experience that our community has is that there was some sort of serendipitous fate that brought us together in this moment with the right book, the right resource, the right smile, the right kind of support for the community, and that that kind of -- that serendipitous feeling is there, but it's so planned.
Because we've been attuned to our community.
So we plan to really look at instead of bringing fully baked ideas and plans, and is developed ideas, really we're taking a mind-set to build together so that our partners, there's space for our community, our staff, and our partners to contribute the assets and the things that are most meaningful to us and to them, so that we can continue to learn from one another, gives us lots of room for imperfection, but ideally what we're aiming for is that anyone in the county, their success in life is no longer determined by their race, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, the ZIP code where they were born, and to achieve that means that voices have to be heard.
So we actually just on Tuesday our steering team for our priority audience went through a couple of the activities, how might we, we used the rose thorn Bud design activity to talk about a plan that we've conceptualized to start a community advisory council, but first with our front line staff.
And make sure that we understand what it looks like to hear community voice and bring it into the organization's decision make process.
Our aim is in a year or so  ideally aspirationally we would be able to bring our customers, community members into that advisory council.
So we wanted to give ourselves a little bit of experiments internally and make sure that customer voice is part of the organization's DNA, which we're on that journey for sure.
We'll be using some of the concepts too that were presented as a whole, will be really  looking at how we might use them within distinct projects.
So as we're doing service recovery design thinking and many of these concepts are going to be built in, as ways of helping everyone with ideation and what might it looks like, what could it look like, what are the facets at the end of the day, what is the experience that people, our customers, community should be walking away from the library with?
And this may not be walking away from the library, but rather where the library shows up in those spaces where community is.
And we're really aiming this building together, hoping to create synergy so that the impacts that we know we're a key part of in our community can really be shining.
>> Fantastic, Jaime, thank you so much.
What a wonderful recap of your journey so far.
Let's go ahead and move on and Zachary and Gidae are here from the Prince George'S County Memorial Library System.
>> Hello, everybody.
I'm Zachary Jones.
>> I'm Gidae Campbell.
>> And we're here today to talk to you a little bit about our own system here at Principles George'S County.
We're a diverse system, we have about 19 branches that all serve different unique communities, so one of our things was to try to find ways that we can make our system flexible and accessible to everyone while still allowing each customer to create their own world they want to see.
A little bit about us, we got a new CEO and so we've been  working on a new strategic plan, and one of the things that came out of our planning was giving our customers the opportunity and putting the library in their hands, so they can create their own opportunities and create their own programs, they can create the things they want to see that will help further them in their own career path or whatever path they are on.
Before COVID struck, we had a lot of physical programming, which included computer assistance, 101 homework help, we did outreach programs, we were in the schools, we were going to various places, so we were really physically hands-on.
Woe were there, and we let people know who we were.
But after COVID struck, I think this happened to a lot of systems, where you're stuck, you're trying to figure out what is next, what are we going to  do, how are we going to get the same type of service to our customers that relied on us so much?
How are you going to provide internet access for those who don't have access to computers anymore?
How are you going to provide reading material for those who don't have physical access?
So what we did was we created virtual programs.
We did virtual read-alongs, we did virtual tutorials, we have visited the schools virtually, and we've created things where people could come and voice their own opinions, and they can profess their own experiences.
We've done virtual open mics to allow people to promote their own works.
So we're kind of thinking outside of the box to allow each library's community to create their own world.
So that brings to us this question -- how do you we implement these strategies during this COVID pandemic?
>> Moving forward, we wanted to try and understand how we could transform the service that we offer our customers.
And like Gidae mentioned, currently in post-COVID, physical and virtual programs, more COVID relief, whether it's in the form of normal social services and community services, but also for the small  businesses, we linked them to resources to find out this information.
I myself, I'm a member of the -- of our systems workforce, and professional development team, and what I've been doing is working more towards helping people with jobs and careers as most people know, unemployment is a big thing that's going on, and that has happened during this pandemic.
So helping people wherever you can is one of the most important things.
And above all, we want to have equity, we want the people that come in to our libraries and have this experience with our system to understand that we see you.
Like we said in our previous lives, we see you and we want to be seen as well.
And lastly, we want to promote lifelong learning.
So the keys to our customer experience, these are really the principle experiences  that we were able to hash out with ma dispies Patrick in our group -- Matias and pa flick our group.
They seemed to work together, and through our process we were able to identify the circle of how the customer experience works, and one of the first keys is meeting people where they  are.
We want to be able to assess all customers from all walks of  life.
We want to be able to say, hey, whatever your different barriers might be, whether they're socioeconomic, language, compute literacy, whatever it is, we want to meet you and serve you in that process.
And by doing that, we open the door.
When we open the door, we're welcoming, we're inclusive, we're helpful, we're attentive, and we're aware, but above anything, we're empathetic, because we know that during this time we're all going through this pandemic, and we're all kind of in the same boat, trying to navigate it.
We want to always create and promote this space for personal community growth.
And we do that by putting the library in the hands of the community.
We want to ask our customers what their needs are.
What they want to achieve.
What they want to pursue, what new thing you want to learn about.
When we get this information and gather this information, we want to be intentional with this information.
We want to make sure we start developing these things for our community, so they understand that we see you, and with that, we move into the last portion, which is shout and not Shhh.
So we're saying not being quiet.
We want to be seen too.
So we're exposing our self, we want the community to know what value that we have for the community and how influential we can be in making their dreams come true.
And we just want to continue to be a reflection of our  community.
The take-aways that we gained from doing this case study work was, we took the time to put ourselves in the mind-set of the customers.
What do you want the library to look like if you were entering?
One of the great things like about me and Gidae is that we are Prince Georgians, we grew up going to these libraries, so some of the people that work in our system now still work there.
So it's like now we have this opportunity now as going from being customers to being the people who work there, to create this atmosphere for our customers.
So we are taking the ownership as both creators and the consumers.
And like we said, in doubt, just always ask your customers.
Customers always the best source of what we plan to implement, and just be inclusive and be aware of meeting people where they are.
And the phrase that I think, and that captures what we're doing as our strategic plan and what we got from this case study is, by creating this experience, it's helping someone create the world that they want to see.
So we thank you guys for letting us share about what this was for us, and the Prince George's library system moving forward, we hope to implement this into our customer experience moving forward when we interact with people.
So thank you very much.
>> Fabulous.
You tell such fabulous stories.
I want to also give a huge thanks to the leadership of Georgia Lomax at Pierce county, and Nicky at Altadena for allowing to us work with your team and really to Jaime's  point, they were kind, they were just coming off the heels also of some leadership changes, and strategic work, and what we were able to work with you all was that rolling up your sleeves, practicing with intention, and learning through doing.
And so one of the big goals of the workshopping process, and with these webinars is we want to really encourage and be a support system all of us, we're all in such a wonderful library land as a community, it's such a grairks generous space, and we want to do what we can do to support the webinar and potentially build a learning circle with you all.
So you all, we hope to have  imparted some ideas that will enable you all to take facts, live win tension T. obsess with your community members, and have a rigor around really learning and listening and uncovering their stories, their hopes, dreams, and even giving you some thoughts about how you all can use this workshopping in either in some of the ways that you're already working together, and some of the ways that you might think about realigning the way you all as an institution work together.
And we work with library systems all over the country, all sizes and shapes, big, small, medium, and everything in between, and it just takes gathering a group of peers and we've put together some structures, I know there have been a lot of great questions about how can we do this daily, weekly, monthly, in our organizations.
So we started to think about ways for you all to think about integrating it into the way  you -- that's the way you work now, and opportunities, and it really does just take gathering a group of like-minded folks who are interested in making community change, and so I've put together a construct of potentially, you might want to get together with your library peers as we've done with this working session, and it also makes me think that many of you who are from different library systems can also work together to develop some, how might wees and experience principles to also continue the practice and the learning.
You can do it with your  partners, some of our library systems that bework with have gathered partners to create partner learning circle.
And you can also even bring in community members to use these techniques to do community problem solving and community cocreation.
And I think really echoing on Zach and Gidae, be open, shall visionary, be bold, defer judgment, and in the working with each other, it's always an asset-based approach, yes and, we're always building, and always improving.
The other thing that you all can do once you gather your group that you'd like to collaborate with, you can create a shared set of experience principles.
And again, practice, practice, practice so they don't to be perfect.
We just want you to get started.
And these are examples of experience principles that the city library, Salt Lake City Public Library developed after Patrick and I also worked with them on some strategic work to develop a system approach to intentional experience principles that helps guide their work.
And these are just some preliminary ideas that we had where you can start to integrate this work seamlessly and to meeting and gatherings or even services that you're already doing.
So one idea is that even daily, you can kind of group with a partner in crime, get -- gather a partner in crime that you work with, and for example, if you could just commit to creating an experience principle, experience that day, so if we're referring to the Salt Lake City experience principles, we just generated this notion of today we will commit to practicing with our curbside services, we will make our customers feel awesome.
So that kind of intentionality then gives you an opportunity to practice prototype that engagement throughout the day, and then at the end of the day you can reflect and take some learnings from how it worked, how it didn't work, and how you might want to improve, fostering those commitments the next day.
That's one way.
Weekly we thought it would be great with a small group of folks, take this motion of problem framing, identifying opportunities, defining experience attributes, and envisioning future experiences.
Really just a small-scale, like if you're doing staff meetings on a weekly basis, you can integrate it into meetings that you're already having.
And then monthly it gives you an opportunity with a larger group to also spend more time to develop, reflect, and share, and we know from the twhoork we do, the more sharing that you all have the opportunity to do with each other, just like the great list of programs that you all are doing, the faster and more efficient we're able to learn, what's possible.
So those are just a few ways we've started to think about it.
But we'd love some ideas from y'all about how y'all could see integrating the opportunity to collaborate and cocreate with each other, and to systems that you already are working with, with meetings or gatherings and/or questions.
And I think one of the things we'll leave with you all as a question is if you're interested in continuing the conversation with those of us who have been presenting, certainly we'd love to hear from you all so that we can help support the questions that you have, and I'm going  to -- Lyna, you can put in the chat, maybe we can put in the cheers email, and invite anyone who is interested in continuing the conversation to let us know.
Because we'd love -- our big agenda in this is to really support your learnings and provide techniques so that you all can really use best  practices that exist, the communities that are commended to creating transfor nation your communities, use the resources that we have to really take advantage of this impress -- unprecedented time where innovation and creativity can flourish.
So we encourage that.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
>> Fantastic.
Thank you so much.
>> I want to thank everyone who did such an amazing job.
Just so proud to hear your stories and all the work that you all did.
So thank you, thank you.
>> Yeah.
It's really impressive to hear all the work that the libraries have put into this, and I think you're really right in terms of this being an unprecedented  time, because we know that, yes, we've got years of doing what we've been doing, but with everything sort of thrown up in the air, what better time than to spend -- and you all emphasize that it does take time to do this, but building it into your processes is a genius way to make time for it.
There were a couple questions I'd love to have you answer, or if you want to have your case study libraries answer, I thought one specific one in terms of the community conversations, if -- besides the community conversations, are there other means that libraries were using to get feedback from the patrons and community?
It would be great to hear.
Maybe Margaret from your experience what you've seen libraries use to gather that input, and then feel free to have other folks chime in.
>> Yeah.
That's a great question.
The other part of service design that we didn't touch on in this series, and Patrick T. I might cue up somebody from your team too too get more description to what I'm saying, and then library folks we'll let you all speak to the tools y'all have been using.
But there are any number, just a handful of wonderful tools to engage community members in a variety of community engagement formats and techniques.
To listen and learn.
And one of the techniques that  Harmonic has taught us that is really good for the work that you ral seeing today is called Directed Storytelling.
And it allows you to spend about 1½ hours, one-on-one with a community member, and you can make -- you can my community member as someone who is a power user, as someone who is -- because you want to talk to your core customer and you know if you really please your core customer, they're going to be the low-hang than fruit come back for more.
You could be targeting family with young children, if you're curious about our services meeting those needs.
And you could also identify, we want to be curious about having a long engagement session with nonusers, with folks that we're not reaching.
So the value of the directed storytelling is it enables you to go deep.
It's a different method than doing a larger community survey, because it will result in the opportunity to listen and learn.
For met, unmeet, and undermet needs in a disciplined structure that feeds into the structure on which you're recreating, reenvisioning, and designing future experiences that you saw here.
And I know with the all tall Deena and with the Prince  George's county strategic work, they engaged in direct the storytelling techniques as well, so Gidae and Zach might want to speak with that.
I will let Patrick tag on so he can give a further explanation, and I'll open it to Gidae and Zach about their experience with it.
>> Thanks, Margaret.
Just briefly, Margaret mentioned going deep.
The key thing in understanding what's happening in the community and then being able to respond to those dynamics is to really mix methods over time.
And what we've found over many years working with libraries is that doing more of these qualitative methods such as having deep conversations with the community are good to balance the other types of information that's being captured in terms of  transactional data and surveys, and other type of quantitative information.
So in the end what you want to be able to do is go wide, because you can't have a deep conversation with thousands of people in an efficient manner, so that's what surveys are good for.
To understand when you want to go to understand broad things and large numbers of people.
But you want to do is pair with that going deeper.
When you go deeper, you also want to use that as an opportunity to also Zoom out.
So understanding the community not just as a customer of the library, but as a person in the community.
What are they trying to accomplish in their lives, how do they interact with the library, other institutions, how are they trying to meet those needs and achieve their goals.
Because what that will show you is where there might be new opportunities to add new value to the community rather than only improving what you offer today.
You should always be improving your services, but also looking to extend, provide new things, because as we know, as we've learned definitely over the last year, things change.
And so it's really important to go deep with people on a regular basis.
And I'll hand it back to you, Margaret.
>> Okay.
Gidae and Zach, do you want to talk about y'alls' experiences with directed storytelling?
>> Yeah, sure.
Directed storytelling is pretty helpful when it comes to coming up with new ideas and just kind of getting a feel of the people that are going to be a part of your community.
When I was working at my little small library, I did a lot of interacting and talking one-on-one with the customers, because we had the time, we had the space, and that gave me a chance to figure out what they actually needed in that area.
My area was in arts district, and I was able to grab some live artist and get them to come in and demonstrate some painting techniques, and we did a lot of art history programs while we were there.
So it was really good to talk to your customers, don't be afraid, but also I would say don't force the conversation.
Sometimes building -- building takes time, and it can't happen instantly.
Once you build that rapport with that customer, or with whoever is coming to your library, you can learn a lot about the things that need to be done and a lot of the things you can do instead of just asserting your own ideas and your own desired programs.
What might work somewhere else might not work at your specific branch.
So always break out of that box and feel free to talk to your customers and then feel free to pull it back in when you feel like you've learned enough information for that day and you can continue with them the next day.
>> Also to piggyback on what Gidae said, my conversation and my directed storytelling kind of was actually built around something totally random.
We started talking about baseball and it segued into the gentleman I spoke to all his various interests, and his love of sports, and the history of sports and things like that, and I began to start thinking about the types of programs or conversation clubs, or even  he -- I even found out by talking to him that he's actually a person that heads a fantasy baseball team.
So creating a program around fantasy baseball could be developed from just having a conversation with your  community.
So like Gidae said, just being engaged with your community and finding out those things are very, very important.
>> There were a few other questions, Patrick I wonder if you would willing to -- we've just got about four minutes, if you want to touch on those, the one was around community asset mapping, if you want to address how -- I don't know, I can't remember if we -- if you shared tools around that.
But community asset mapping, and there was a great question, I can address -- I can mention later if you want to start with that.
>> Sure.
I think in terms of community asset mapping, I think this is a complement to that, because obviously the community asset mapping is specific method that it tries to uncover specific things related to those assets.
And so one of the things is often with that is doing these activities like the ones that were presented today in the teams, and looking at also things coming out of other approaches, and not just asset mapping, but other common methods that are used in -- for libraries.
And then looking at the connections among them to help complete -- to build a complete picture of the dynamics of the community as you're thinking about it as an ecosystem.
In which there are human and nonhuman entities that you're trying to understand the relationships of, and then how can you amplify the strengths  that exist in communities, and then how can you then start to determine how to address where there may be new assets or investments needed to be able to reach the stated outcomes that you're trying to drive towards.
 in a given community.
>> Excellent.
>> That's a brief answer.
>> Right.
Right.
One final question, when the how might we questions were being worked through and we saw how the clustering and grouping of principles into themes happened, then did the libraries converge on one of the how might we to tackle together, and how do you equip or support the library then to act on or implement the concept?
So how --
>> Got it.
We kept the how might wees by library.
So they chose their own, and how might wees can exist at different levels.
So you can create how might wees that are like an initiative you want to go after.
And what we did was find multiple opportunities, frame them as how might wees, and the team kind of narrowed in on ones related to both specific customers and specific opportunities that they felt were connecting to other things they had been talking about within their libraries.
Some things that were things that were definitely hot topics, and other ones were things that have kind of been in their strategic plans and wanted to dig more deeply into those.
So it was a decision that each library team made on what would add the most value.
And would be the ones that they felt most equipped to do in the format that we were doing.
And then what was the second part of the question?
>> Let's see.
Well, it was just how do you --
>> How to implement?
>> Yeah.
>> So implementation, so if we had more time to work with the teams, what you want to do is start making things.
There's a time for modeling and thinking through a problem, but really, what you want to do is have a bias towards making.
And so what we encourage people to do is to make prototypes, make their concepts, make some tangible expressions of what the -- some solutions could be, and then to start to get feedback on those from, not just the community, but also employees or other people that are part, would be part of the service.
And then the other thing that you do in service design is  you -- we often do a technique called service blueprinting which is where you model what -- how the service should work.
Working backwards from the experience you want to create for people, back towards then what -- how do we deliver 90 terms of processes and capabilities that we need to do it, and then that informs  designing things like processes.
So it's kind of the reverse of the way often things are made in organizations where you design a process and think about, okay, now how do people experience the processes as the reverse?
>> Fantastic.
Wow.
You've given us a lot to think about.
And a lot to explore.
And thank you so very much, especially to the libraries who brought their case study work to the community, to Margaret, and Patrick, your teams are wonderful.
And Margaret, unfortunately lost her connection with her laptop, so be sure and thank Margaret for us.
And I will send you all to a short survey as you leave, please provide feedback, we'll share with our presenters, and it helps us in our ongoing programming.
And I'll also send you all an email later on today once the recording is posted, and a certificate later next week when -- with your certificate for attendance.
Thank you all again, and everyone, stay safe, and warm for those of you that aren't  getting power barks hopefully you can warm up and move on.
Thank you all very much.
And have a great rest of your week.