On March 31st 2019, Chan Wai Ling, acting deputy director of The National Library Board, Singapore and her colleague Soh Lai Huat, associate librarian for the public library network in Singapore, visited Hangzhou Public Library. On April 1st, Zhuang Huajun, deputy director of Hangzhou Public Library held a meeting, where Chan addressed a speech on Learning by Design Thinking. Over 100 librarians participated and warmly applauded her speech.
As the participants of Design Thinking workshop which held in Guangzhou from Mar. 24 to Mar. 29, Chen Yan and Zhang Weiran were invited to share their learning experiences. Chen recorded the daily learning into a piece of video, demonstrating the whole learning process vividly. Zhang shared short interviews on the main tutor group, initiators of global design thinking program, namely teams from Aarhus Public Libraries, Chicago Public Library.
Chan Wai Ling, pioneer of Design Thinking promotion, shared that how their public libraries implemented design thinking to reimage? their libraries and improve their services.
She analyzed the necessity of design thinking and its feasibility of implementation in Singapore’s library community. She took Library@orchard as an example to illustrate how design thinking helped improve the model, and obtained feedback for patrons, as well as to demonstrate the importance of having empathy while using design thinking. She also emphasized design thinking implementation benefited not only their patrons, but also volunteers, staff and social groups as a whole. The target of such thinking is not to just seek solutions, but to explore and detect more potential problems. At last, Chan appealed for immediate action from even baby step and put design thinking into our daily work. She shared a motto from Elon Musk as an end of her speech, saying that ”There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option…Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
The sharing contained successes and failures, theories and cases, which showcased us the popular trend of current international library community, and a brand new tool to facilitate daily work. We are grateful for Chan’s generous sharing and looking forward to welcome more experts for communication and cooperation.
