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title: On participatory design in library architecture
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    feature: header_library_space.png
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This week, our COPIM WP2/WP3 reading group discussed Meunier, Benjamin, and Olaf Eigenbrodt, ‘More Than Bricks and Mortar: Building a Community of Users Through Library Design’, _Journal of Library Administration_, 54.3 (2014), 217–32 <[https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166](https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2014.915166)>. We were interested to consider the implications of participatory design in library architecture for new digital infrastructures.

Several points leaped out at me while I was reading this piece. The first was the balance between individual self-control/responsibility/user agency and architectural facilitation. A good example of this was the incorporation of ‘wifi cold spots’ into the infrastructure; that is, specific points in the building that were designed to block wifi signals. Users had claimed they had wanted this, but I wondered why it was the expectation that the _architecture_ or _infrastructure_ should be responsible for something that users could themselves control. After all, every smartphone has an ‘airplane mode’. In designing a library in this way, it is possible that the architecture will become disabling for some users when it reaches capacity.

I was also interested that there was the assumption in the text that all libraries should be friendly, welcoming spaces to diverse sets of users. However, this is not a view shared by the entirety of the research community. As any users of the British Library will know well, every six months or so there is a campaigning group who are outraged that undergraduates are using the library ([I wrote about this a decade ago!](https://eve.gd/2010/03/22/undergraduates-in-the-british-library-reading-rooms/)). For these users, making the space _more intimidating_ might serve their model of access, in which they believe that undergraduates should use London's university libraries and Senate House, and the British Library should be reserved only for postgraduates with a genuine research need. It is true that the capacity at the British Library is often depleted and there is a need to prioritise access. Yet, it seems counterintuitive to scare away potential future research participants (undergraduates) through exclusionary practices (although the argument is that the undergraduates are not really working when at the BL).

I suppose there are some clear analogies here with open access. Not everyone thinks it's a good idea and some prefer scholarship to have some intimidating facades. Others point, validly, to some of the new exclusions that are erected by certain models for OA (APCs and BPCs), although such criticisms often fail to note the exclusionary nature of the _current_ subscription/purchasing mechanisms and the fact that what is being excluded is participation _in the prestige economy of publishing_, not the ability, outright, to publish. Also, likewise with wifi cold spots, how much expectation do we place in the infrastructure/architecture to make the user experience seamless? Should OA be frictive and disruptive for research users (i.e. they have to change their practices, as in the Research England green OA policy that requires _researchers_ to put their work in the repository)? Such friction-driven design -- as opposed to wifi-cold-spot design -- requires users of the system to _think_ about the research publication system in which they participate, rather than assuming that it will always work as it has within their experience.