Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Academic Library: A Participatory Design Approach

This presentation highlight a new initiative at the Montana State University Library: User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP). The goals of the UXUP project are both practical and political. Practically, UXUP aims to create better user experiences for our campus’s Native American student population. Politically, UXUP aims to create new space for Native voices to enter the decision-making structures of the Library. To achieve these goals, we followed the methodology of Participatory Design, which has its roots in Scandinavian systems design of the 1970s. Participatory Design begins with the idea that the user and the designer each possess skills and perspectives of equal worth. This equity is realized through a practice of collaborative power-sharing and decision-making that deeply connects the user with the design outcome. For the UXUP project, the Library worked with our Native American community to develop a participatory design practice anchored by a Native American student group empowered to make design decisions. This talk will overview our design principles, process, and products, including a discussion of the connections between Scandinavian participatory design and indigenous research methodologies that seek to deconstruct oppressive, colonial power structures. The UXUP project can serve as a model for empathetic and collaborative design research