lauren's library blog

• Concept Engineering with a new toolkit: mutate, rethink, spin, migrate, transform, stimulate, displace, fuse, translate triggers
• Opportunity hacking: white spaces, black holes, hidden worlds, missing colors, unusual perspectives, reversed focus, paradoxes, hybrids
• Future of book?
  • The Community book
  • Living the story
  • 360 degree book
  • The power of added intangibles

• Finding platform and thinking scenario
• Creative thinking sources: cut and paste/remix, socio-mechanic, collision0asymmetries, magical and alchemical, comedy, science fiction.
• Re-Contextualizing platforms: Implicate not replicate, integrate disparate areas, higher order properties, platform as an event, dimensions not units, human-centric
• Enhancing the book?
• Create scenario

• What’s relevant in one moment probably isn’t relevant in the next.
• Be your own competition.
• Evoke all your senses.
• Be a DJ.

Dr. Wendy Schultz

Infinite Futures: Foresight Research and Training

Future Library Users and Literacy: Applying Foresight

• Future studies is about coping with uncertainty
• Lot of tools based on straight-line thinking in physics. Closed and Linear.
  • But reality not that simple. It is complicated & chaotic.

• Future Studies tries to minimize chaos, create coping mechanism and changes (which leads to more chaos)
• Don’t have just one future… have an array of possible futures.
• Some futures are more probable than others
• Some futures are more preferable than others
  • Do assumption and value mapping to figure out which

• How do we get where we want to go? This is the objective of future studies.
• Five components of applied futures research: ID & Monitor Change, Critique Implications, Imagine Differences, Envision Preferred, Plan and Create Change
• Begin with scanning: look for information! Research!
• What is the library user of the future like?
  • Useful diagram that includes demographics, lifestyles, technology, economics, &c.

• Futurist provides context
• Decide dynamics, ID inputs: map the origins and structures of library and information systems to the present, decide what change drivers you will study (social change)
• Library Users in 2026 will have grown up with
  • Mass customization
  • Immersive media
  • Participatory
  • Make own media
  • Not team but extreme sports

• Discussion of “Digital Natives”
  • High speed, always on
  • Digital data gathering and sharing
  • Immersive graphics
  • 24/7/365 gratification

• Blurring between organic & inorganic
• Generation growing up in open community will probably appreciate folksonomies more than LC
• Generation growing up with non-linear, multipoint mesh will probably appreciate something more like a concept map than linear LC
• Information economy fades into the aesthetic economy
• Geodesic thinking:
  • what happens when an entire generation grows up in layered, multidimensional, multi-directional information environments? The end of linear thinking.
  • Point out emergence of new oral culture on the foundation of voice input
  • Ambient information
  • Point to multipoint thinking, rather than linear cause & effect

• Library users of 2046:
  • Systems thinkers—stress linkages
  • Post-cultural: no fixed cultural view
  • Expanded sense
  • Techno-telepathy
  • Void consciousness
  • Fluid social structures

• Beyond Library 2.0…
  • Each version absorbs those before it
    • Library 1.0: about commodities
    • Library 2.0: about products: tags, digital downloads, etc
    • Library 3D: about services: books have online personalities, library avatars, VR information coaches with personalize introductions… Avatar version of Amazon’s recommendations but with greater depth and personalization
    • Library 4.0: about experience: What is the library in the experience economy?
    • Future Library as knowledge spas: meditation, relaxation, and immersion in luxury of ideas, insights, and creativity?
    • What do you see as next step: digitize and dematerialize, create avatars, mash-up, and digital experts, redesign bricks & mortar to create rich experience, find funding?

• Take away points:
  • Schultz reminded me of my philosophy classes in college.
  • Futurism as an interdisciplinary field
  • Things that get outdated become luxury items (think swords), so books will always be around as a high-end experience.

• Schultz also used a Mac.
  

  Stacey Aldrich

  Librarian & Futurist

  • Best way to predict the future is to have an active part in creating it
  • Four Questions
    • 1. Is everyone in your organization going the same direction?
      • Assumptions about the future?
      • They affect the way we make decisions & the way we act.
      • Make assumptions explicit!

    • 2. Are the right people in the right positions?
      • Do people have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes we need?
      • Are the people in the positions now risk-takers, problem solvers, action oriented? Are they brainstormers? Passionate? Patron oriented? Who are in positions of leadership?

    • 3. Does your organizational environment encourage creative problem solving, team learning (debrief after event, share what you learn at conferences, etc.), and innovative ideas?
    • 4. Who are the scouts in your organization?
      • Scout role: look for insights outside libraries, look at trends that are impacting library services, look for ways for your library to make community impact
      • Who? The ones asking why & looking to improve, the ones who ar reaching, touching, and trying everything, and staff who read, listen, and watch world all the time & are making connection.
      • How? Read/watch/listen/try, touch base with Futurist, go to conferences outside libraries, innovate/create/experiment with ideas they find & communicating them with the staff.

  • Three big questions
    • What is it?
    • What does it mean?
    • How can libraries adapt, innovate, or create services around the concept?

  • What should scouts look for:
    • Social patterns
    • Info use patterns
    • New technologies
    • New business and organization models
    • Changing political landscapes
    • Changing economies
    • Local demographics

  • Scouts, a few starters:
    • Intelligent computing
    • New methods for computing
    • Fabbing: using pattern to print a duplicate object
    • Folksonomy
    • Sony has a patent for beaming sensory experiences directly into the brain
    • High definition learning
    • Robotics and AI
    • Target ads on the roof of the buildings so they’ll show up on Google Maps
    • Grafedia: text message address and get more information on the object through their cell phone

  • If Scouts are formal (rather than informal) it opens up dialog among staff about these ideas
  • Aldrich also used a Mac.
    

    Q&A

    • Future studies about transformation not evolution
    • Compare your strategies for your strategic plan to various futurist scenarios. How would you come out in each?
    • Look into Strategic Foresight: the Power of Standing in the Future
    • Job description for a “Scout:” make it sound exciting! Include things in the “Who” section above, passionate people who want to make a difference in libraries.
    • Libraries as places where we steward the best of what humans have done (in past, print, in future, possibly not)
    • Look less at what the new technologies are, but do look at what the added value is.
    • Whether than protect what library has been, look what is possible for libraries
    • Also New Thinking for a New Century and anything by that author

    Major takeaways for me:

    • I need to look into Future Studies
    • I like being an informal scout
    • I’m in good company with my computer.

    What a great panel! I also sat at a table with some really nice librarians. I’m really glad I went. However, to go I had to miss the ALA-Governance Forum on International Library Education. Did anyone go and blog it? Was it interesting?