Become a Designer and See Problems as Opportunities : How Does UX and Design Thinking Relate to the Democratic Mission of Libraries?

In this paper we describe UX and design thinking as a method for library development, and we describe the library as a democratic arena and its democratic mission. These ideas and methods are becoming more of common use among libraries. Since public libraries have a democratic mission we find it relevant to examine what view is presented within these new methods of libraries, users and democracy. Design thinking and UX have developed within the private sector, and since libraries in Sweden are financed by the public sector conflicts may arise between the two. The purpose of this paper is to perform an ideology analysis of the document Design thinking for libraries – Toolkit (the Swedish version). This with the purpose to shed light on these aspects, and to find out how they relate to Paulo Freire’s and Henry Giroux’s theories of critical pedagogy and radical democracy with the concepts empowerment and marginalisation. From the analysis, an ideological view emerges that promotes neoliberal values, instead of a more radical democratic view that we would expect to find since the Toolkit is created as a method for library development. Users appear as providers of information, which is then used as a design-tool for this development. Compared to Freire and Giroux, this is not equal to empowerment since focus is not on strengthening users. In addition to this, we have found that problems are not allowed to exist in the Toolkit since they are invariably supposed to be seen as opportunities instead, which gives the impression that marginalisation is a person’s own fault. Furthermore, the Toolkit emphasises the librarian instead of the user, and also requires that the practitioner is open minded, positive and trusts the process. In other words, there is not much room for reflection or critical thinking, either among staff or users, hence, democracy is not promoted