Understanding Users and Ecosystems

My work is driven by a commitment to center users and communities. In my research and teaching, I use and introduce methods for understanding and designing for people.

Through my civic data work, I have been deeply informed by the strengths-based approaches in community engagement and believe these approaches are critical to the design of services and resources. Through a strengths-based approach, a researcher or service provider focuses on exploring existing understandings and community initiatives and working to complement and advance those existing understandings and strengths. This strengths-based approach is important for meaningful, sustaintainable, and respectful research, design, and community engagement.

Ecosystem Mapping as a Method

Thanks to the mentorship I have received from the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center, I often use an ecosystem mapping approach in my research, teaching, and design work.

When I work with students preparing for careers in libraries or when we hold Civic Switchboard workshops, we use an ecosystem mapping method for conceptualizing roles for libraries in digital inclusion and civic data work. Inventorying other players in an ecosystem engaged in the work, mapping relationships among them, and identifying gaps and opportunities are important initial steps toward designing meaningful roles, services, tools, and resources that are responsive to people and communities. Getting members of the ecosystem together to develop this map is a particularly impactful strategy.

I've worked with the Civic Switchboard team to develop resources on ecosystem mapping for library workers who are designing civic data roles for their libraries:

Introduction to Ecosystem Mapping as a Method : Civic Switchboard Guide

In our Civic Switchboard Guide, we describe methods for building a deeper understanding of organizations and players engaged in civic data work. We frame this step as critical for design of civic data roles for libraries.

Ecosystem Mapping Educational Resources

In our Civic Data Education Series, we offer materials to help library workers and library and information student students builld an understanding of ecosystem mapping. These materials include a recording, a script and slides for the session, activities, and additional readings.

Participatory Design Methods

Participatory design refers to the involving users in the creation of services, technology, spaces, and resources that are meaningful and responsive to their needs and interests.

I was fortunate to learn participatory design methods in my Ph.D. training, namely through a user-centered methods course and graduate assistantships with Dr. Leanne Bowler. I was a collaborator on a participatory design project focused on young people and cyberbullying. This research was published in the The Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) and the iConference 2014 in Berlin, where it won the Lee Dirks Award from Microsoft Research for Best Paper. Our iConference paper:

"presents a user-generated framework for designing affordances that would counter acts of cyberbullying on social media sites. To do so, we used narrative inquiry as a research methodology, which allowed our two focus groups - one composed of teens and the other of undergraduate students - to map out a cyberbullying story and overlay it with a set of design recommendations that, in their view, might alleviate mean and cruel behavior online" (Bowler, Mattern, and Knobel, 2014).

This graduate work influenced subsequent research in academic libraries and remains influential. I have held library positions at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Chicago and have employed participatory design and UX methods in work to design research data management services and to customize an open access repository system.

Example Participatory Design Project:

Visualizing Research Lifecycles

This project employed a visual narrative inquiry method to understand library patrons' research process and times within those processes where design inteventions (in the form of services, tools, and resources) would assist them in working with their data.

Example Participatory Design Project:

Card Sorting and Research Transparency

In this project, we used a qualitative card-sorting research protocol that investigated academic librarians’ attitudes, awareness and practices related to research transparency. This project explored their conceptualizations of research transparency and open research, existing library services that support and advocate for both concepts, and potential services that would augment this support and advocacy.