HCI and Design Thinking: Effects on Innovation in the Academic Library

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how two design processes that are seemingly very similar, human-computer interaction design and design thinking, affect innovation in the context of an academic library. Twenty different multidisciplinary projects involving advanced students of interaction design, researchers and library employees, using either of these two approaches or their combination, were conducted during the past four years. We chose two projects that we consider as illustrative of overall findings, in particular, regarding outcomes for diverse stakeholders. Both projects were focusing on the same problem, which many academic (and public) libraries face, of accessing library’s e-book collections and making doing so more enjoyable.

IADIS – International Association for Development of the Information Society http://www.iadis.org