Helping Los Angeles Public Library Patrons Discover a New Perspective

You wander through the library and find a tiny apartment hidden in the stacks. You turn a corner and notice a mysterious mailbox, but aren’t sure if it’s always been there? You lay books before you like a tarot deck, wondering if it might heal a broken heart. I have always believed your local library branch had delightful secrets to share, but I’ve spent this year devoted to creating new ways to uncover them.

(5 Reasons for Authors to Check Out Their Local Library.)

One blazing hot Los Angeles afternoon, my kid and I visited our local branch library, as we often do on blazing hot Los Angeles afternoons. My kid had just learned to read, and I got to watch her in real time, step out of the picture book section and realize her newfound literacy gave her access to the whole library. The look on her face was pure wonder. Where a typical (or at least stereotypical) parent may simply have their heart warmed, I must admit, mine was filled with jealousy—I wanted to feel that wonder and I wanted to feel it there and now. I am not known for my patience.

It just so happened that this very hot day was also a day that I had an assignment for a class at the School for Poetic Computation I was taking from one of my design heroes, April Soetarman. We had been discussing location-based experiences and how a physical space can inform narrative design. The jealousy of my daughter’s wonder and the inspiration from April’s class collided and before I knew it, I was borrowing golf pencils and scratch paper from the reference desk which resulted in the first draft of a piece that would later become a proposal for the Los Angeles Public Library’s Creator in Residence program.

The original plan was simple: Send someone to a section of the library that they may not regularly visit and have them spend some time exploring it with fresh eyes. But how do you motivate someone to leave their favorite subject or genre? How do you even get folks to browse again, especially after a pandemic fortified habits of online holds and a quick pick-up from the hold shelf?

And perhaps the most tricky—how do you give someone a new perspective, especially someone who isn’t a curious 6-year-old kid?

The answer ended up being a strange and wonderful stew of guided meditation, collaborative storytelling, and good ol’ (and often problematic) Melville Dewey.

The library is a place where everyone belongs and where everyone’s curiosity can be stoked. We can ask questions of any size, find solitude without isolation, and can have deep experiences that don’t need to be broadcast to be impactful.

To me there is a reverence in a place that offers community and privacy all at once. All that together makes it an ideal place to imagine, which to me, is sacred.

I worked with librarians in all six regions of the Los Angeles Public Library system, and the most delightful thing I was reminded of over and over, branch to branch, is that librarians care so deeply they are experience designers themselves. From the programming to the branch layout, they are constantly keeping their patrons' experience at front of mind, and it informs all their choices.

Now in its second year, The Los Angeles Public Library, in partnership with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, has established a residency program, the Los Angeles Public Library Creators in Residence, designed to engage creative Angelenos from a multitude of disciplines. The program supports local interdisciplinary creators and inspires new work informed or enhanced by the Los Angeles Public Library’s collections and services, while also highlighting the impact of the library as a creative haven.

I pitched the idea as a series of story prompts that encourage grown-up patrons to “play pretend in the stacks,” and proposed using the very specific Dewey Decimal Classification System as a map and some light bibliomancy as a creative springboard to encourage participants to tell a story that could only take place in a library.

What started as a simple prompt, “You are a Ghost in a Library” became a series of second-person story kits and audio guides that cover all 72 branches of The Los Angeles Public Library. With titles like “You are the Future,” “You are a Giant,” and “You are a Lost Love,” the project covers multiple genres and tones. What they all have in common is that the patron is the center of the story, and without their contribution, like a fountain without water, the piece would simply be a stack of notecards in a wooden box.

The most important instruction to convey was that this is just a way to play: There are no puzzles, no wrong answers, and nothing to win. It is a platform, a story world, a mischievous meditation.

I’ve never liked working alone. I love collaborating—with other artists, with performers, with writers, with my family—and when you design a great in-person interactive experience, you are co-creating with the participant. This is an art form where I never feel alone, even if I never meet my collaborator.

I tend to think of experience design like making a fountain: You can craft the most beautiful structure in the world, but until you put the water in, it is just a sculpture. You can write the hell out of an experience, but until people start interacting with it, it is not complete. You can craft it and theorize and make good guesses as to what will happen, but when you put that water in, you can’t predict how every drop will splash or how every person will (or won’t!) be moved by your experience. That’s the beauty—and the anxiety—and the joy of it.