Sustainable development can be best understood as a holistic approach to improving quality of life, as it takes into account environmental, economic, and social aspects, and the connections that exist between these. Quality of... [ view full abstract ]
Sustainable development can be best understood as a holistic approach to improving quality of life, as it takes into account environmental, economic, and social aspects, and the connections that exist between these. Quality of life is a concept that can be explained using Nussbaum’s Capabilities’ Approach (2011), in which how free an individual feels to make choices reveals more about a country’s development than economic growth. Governments must therefore provide the right conditions for individuals to feel empowered and choose for themselves, thus becoming problem solvers and agents of change. In this paper we describe a joint effort between the academy and the public sector to understand how Bogotá’s cultural institutions could impact quality of life. Our research team worked with the city’s public library network (BibloRed) in order to understand how the public library institution could prepare and empower current citizens to deal with future local and global problems (50 years from now).
BibloRed is composed of 19 libraries located in different neighborhoods. It is a great institution to work with due to its significant access to a wide array of communities and users (and potential users). Since our research team was composed of anthropologists and designers, we used literature and methods from both disciplines to define our approach. We focused on qualitative research methods such as ethnography, participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and workshops. We also implemented a design thinking methodology (Beckman & Barry, 2007) to transform unclassified and disorganized fieldwork data into a limited number of insights and (afterwards) a prototype. Finally, considering our research was projective, we used speculative design theory (Dunne & Raby, 2013) to conceive the local and global problems Bogotá’s citizens would have to deal with 50 years from now.
The first thing we concluded was Bogotá’s future condition could best be understood as series of wicked problems (Briggs, 2007), as its urban and environmental complications 50 years from now would exhibit strong resistance to resolution and threaten quality of life. This meant BibloRed and its libraries had to rethink themselves in order to adequately prepare current citizens for this future scenario. We suggested the city’s libraries had be less like static institutions and become more like live beings in two ways: first, they should be able to reach remote places, thus being able to have a greater impact on the citizenship. Second, they should be able to obtain constant feedback from their users. This meant questioning the active-library passive user-paradigm, and suggesting a scenario in which knowledge is collectively constructed and in which nobody is just a teacher or just a student. We materialized these two aspects in our prototype: a mobile or “to-go” library that reached citizens in remote places and obtained constant feedback from them. A more direct and fair interaction with the citizenship was the best way libraries and other cultural institutions could empower individuals to become problem solvers and thus increase their quality of life.
Keywords: quality of life, wicked problems, BibloRed, speculative design, library as live being.
