"It's My Library": An Immersive, Empathic and Collaborative Approach to Online Storytelling Design

"It's My Library": An Immersive, Empathic and Collaborative Approach to Online Storytelling Design

This paper presents a case study on the online space design for Peking University’s new library, which is scheduled to finish by 2020. Building a new library traditionally focuses more on organizational planning, but in today’s changing environment, it’s imperative to create a supportive community among students, faculty and alumni. We present 2020: It’s My Library, an interactive web portal for community members & donors to understand the project from multiple facets and to participate in the project. Different from day-to-day library project portals, we explored a user-centered approach which, from users’ perspective, can be summarized as a tri-fold process: Immerse, Empathize, and Collaborate. Firstly, we immerse users in the environment by utilizing advanced interactive design techniques (e.g. background video, bold palette, edgeless layout, etc.). This creates a dynamic and impactful visual representation, and establishes a vibrant branding of the new library that resonates with the digital generation. Secondly, we strategize “mutual empathy” throughout the content. Utilizing the auto-play video stories, student-contributed write-ups and clips, and real-life imagery, we start the conversation from their side, showing our empathy on a personal and emotional level, that we understand what the community cares: pain points, decision-making, impacts, and vision. Thirdly, we genuinely invite the community to collaborate. Traditional library services are in decline, and we must adapt to the changing patterns of knowledge acquisition and sharing by the help from our audience. We reinforce the theme of “My library” by setting up a forum to actively seek feedback to meet their needs. We also created online donation channel to secure funds from donors. In summary, our approach provides a user-centered design framework to engage students, faculty, alumni and general public in the building of new library space. We believe that projects with similar scope could benefit from this practice.