Introduction

Since the 2002 National Academies report entitled Preparing for the revolution (National Research Council 2002), there has been general acceptance that the technological infrastructure supporting scholarly research and teaching practices would induce disruption of traditional academic library operations. Since then, the increasing computational power, diffusion of networks and adoption of digital tools and resources have resulted in significant shifts in user behaviour, but it is less clear that academic libraries and their staffs have been instrumental rather than reactive to these changes.

The evolving global information infrastructure has been accompanied by a growth in design communities who create and share software resources in order to customise tools and tailor solutions for specific use contexts (see, for example, resource sites such as OpenSource.com). An activist bent in many such communities reflects a challenging of the status quo and belief that our information world should not be pre-packaged or controlled by a few, but must enable groups or organisations to tailor technical elements of their environment for local considerations. Further, there is evidence that technology-mediated research practices in some areas are reliant on dedicated software that is produced by team members in real time and which borrows heavily from and reuses parts of other tools (see, for example, Howison & Bullard 2015). In such an environment, co-working practices can result in better infrastructures for specific users and tasks while forming strong community ties that increase social capital. This ecology of mutual design and use covers many different scenarios, but as an approach to technical work it offers a model for organisational design that I believe has significant potential in scholarly environments.

In Dillon (2008) I argued that design approaches to academic library service delivery offered a stronger way of aligning the library and its staff with the core mission of the university. The argument for a design studio framing is outlined further in this chapter. However, I extend the argument for this approach through a consideration of social capital theory as a guiding orientation in which to situate the activities and methods of design thinking. In the following sections I outline how design thinking offers a framing approach to service provision that can place academic libraries into better mission alignment with major stakeholder concerns and activities related to data management, learning support and research practices.