Library Welcome Area + Orientation Gallery

Reframing an opaque institution into a national public resource

Client

Library of Congress,
Washington D.C.

Visioning Phase

Fall 2020

Team

Visioning Lead by Cassandra Cortez Gerardo in collaboration with:
Studio Joseph (exhibition design), Bluecadet (media design), and Slover Linett (audience research)

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Background

Despite the Library of Congress’s prominence as a national institution, research conducted by an outside consultant shows that a vast number of Americans and International tourists had little knowledge to articulate what the Library contains or which services it provides aside from helping Congress.

In addition, a long and confusing underground tunnel from the Capitol Building to the Library’s main building disoriented many visitors upon arriving at a different institution. To better orient visitors while showing them what the Library has to offer, it is creating a new main entrance that will include a new welcome area and an orientation gallery.

Lacking a singular curator, the Library sought outside help to define and plan the two new welcome spaces. Before jumping into the design portion of these two phases, my team worked with the Library of Congress’s internal stakeholders to define the Library’s values, the desired visitor experience, the look and feel of the spaces, and the overarching narratives within the gallery.

Challenge

Accomplishments

During this phase, I worked as the Visioning lead and collaborated with my team at Studio Joseph.

Research

As learning the inner workings of the library were key to thinking about the experience, I conducted 16 individual interviews with key Library of Congress staff. Each interview was bespoke to the interviewee’s expertise and covered everything from the visitor experience and unique research inquiries to learning the facets of the Congressional Research Service. These interviews were indispensable for learning about past approaches to visitor engagement, the Library’s collections, and stakeholders’ goals. My team and I used this content to develop three Visioning workshops.

Staff Interviewee Demographics
16 interviewees from 9 departments

Visioning Workshop 1

The first workshop focused on identifying the Library of Congress’s values and defining what the visitor experience should look like. In addition to group discussion, the workshop was broken into large and small group exercises.

Visioning Workshop 1

Shared Language Exercise — used to identify and hone the institution’s values

Visioning Workshop 1

The Shared Langauge exercise was executed via a live poll through Slido. The answers were anonymous but participants could see the results update in real-time.

Visioning Workshop 1

Experience Metaphors Exercise — provided existing experience precedents to help participants articulate how they envisioned the Library’s new visitor experience

Visioning Workshop 1

The participants were divided into small breakout groups and asked to choose which metaphors worked for the Library and why. The results were recorded in Google Slides.

Visioning Workshop 1

Most relevant metaphors from the exercise.

Visioning Workshop 1

Priorities Card Exercise — provided keywords and visuals to help participants discuss:

• How the Orientation Gallery should look and feel
• The ways visitors should engage with the gallery
• How visitors should feel upon leaving the gallery

Visioning Workshop 1

Participants were divided into break out groups to map their priorities. As a large group, each team presented.

Visioning Workshop 2

The second workshop built upon workshop 1 and the individual interviews. The main focus of this workshop was to identify gallery content and narratives.

Topics + Threads Exercise — participants engaged in a large group discussion identifying a wide range of themes to explore in the Orientation Gallery. The group then narrowed the themes down to seven categories.

Visioning Workshop 2

Screenshot from the exercise in action.

Workshop 2

Content Exercise — in small breakout groups, participants contributed content to the refined thematic buckets

Visioning Workshop 2

Screenshot from the exercise in action.

Visioning Workshop 2

Mapping Narratives Exercise — using the high priority cards from workshop 1, my team and I asked participants to begin to think about how these themes and content could work within the space. This exercise provided a glance into visually mapping the permanent exhibition and how the stories of the Library of Congress could unfold.

Visioning Workshops 1 + 2

Visioning Workshop 1 + 2 Participant Demographics
18 participants from 13 departments

The purpose of the third visioning workshop was to introduce narrative lenses that would help communicate the Library of Congress’s story. These lenses would take into account all of the previous research findings while creating distinct paths for narration, thus providing direction for gallery experiences and content creation. It also enabled the Library’s staff to begin to pull its enormous collection to curate relevant.

My team and I refined the narrative threads from the previous workshop into seven categories.

The narrative threads’ descriptions.

We presented 3 narrative lenses.

This lens captures the importance of the Library as a repository for America’s memory.

My team and I broke down each lens with its narrative threads in order of prominence. We viewed these threads as “dials” that could be turned up or down depending on the narrative lens. We then pulled relevant content from the previous workshop that could fall under each thread.

Each lens included an intended visitor outcome and feelings projection.

Screen capture of the collaboration between the Library and my team after presenting the thread.

Moving into the concept phase, we had two solid narrative directions and a third one to be developed that was a combination of the two.

Visioning Workshop 3

Outcomes

The phase culminated in a document of synthesized findings and recommendations for direction during the concept phase.

We were also able to establish an internal content task force to help lead the curatorial end of the project.

The team was able to proceed into the concept phase with a narrative direction and content buckets to help better plan the interactive experiences and spatial layout. My team gained a clearer understanding of the Library’s intention within each space and the visitor experiences that were desired. Through the workshops, the Library’s stakeholders were better able to articulate the desired aesthetics and overall look and feel of the spaces, removing the guesswork as we moved into the concept phase.