Who is this for and what will we do?
This guide has been made for library workers, especially those that are experiencing low-morale and burnout. It was made with library workers through a series of interviews, focus groups, and participatory workshops.
It is sensitive to the wide range of institutional power and social capital library workers reading this might hold. It recognizes that restoration and connection look different for everyone. What you will see and make through this work will have your fingerprint. It will be seeded by and grow from your lived experiences, personal wisdom, relationships, and intentions.
This field guide will help you design and discover those restorative environments in your library.
Design
It will help you develop mindsets and skills to create restorative environments.
Discovery
It will help you spot restorative potential and explore the restorative environments that work best for you.
Not a How To
What you actually do with this guide will vary based on your needs, your work environment, and your capacity to engage in work like this right now. The reason this is a field guide and not a how to guide is because restorative environments look different for everyone. What you end up doing with this is your own to design and discover.
“People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.”
— Christopher Alexander
You will use the field guide and activities to tap into the restorative potential already around you. This potential might be inside you, in others, in your environment, or in digital spaces.
Interestingly, those very things — our inner dialogue, social experience, environment, and technology may also prevent restoration, too. Both designing and discovering restorative environments requires creating conditions for restoration and navigating the tensions created by doing so.
Because our environments are typically not restorative, it may be easier to imagine restorative potential by considering the depleting environments you commonly experience. What are the qualities and aspects of these environments that create the feeling of depletion for you? What qualities of a space (physical, emotional, social, technological) might help you experience the opposite?
It's important to realize that whatever you do with this guide, the work will be cyclical and iterative. Here's an example of how a small activity could snowball into a change to the staff-only space through iteration.
You might start by listening more deeply to a trusted friend or colleague through an empathy map.
That new way of listening might turn into a new way to listen in a meeting you regularly attend.
You might ask folks in that meeting to try a come back circle, endeavoring to listen well.
Then, you might identify a colleague in that meeting that's interested in talking more about restorative environments.
You and your colleague might walk around the library on a go along, identifying restorative features of certain spaces.
You might decide to play pretend to imagine a restorative environment. You repurpose an empty storage closet as a restorative space.
You might set out post-it notes for colleagues to share their kudos, questions, and concerns, realizing that people feel weird about the closet.
So, you might move the space to a comfy chair near a window in the staff room that has a nice view and conduct a field observation to see how folks use it.
Whether you are trying to listen more deeply to a colleague or designing a new space in the staff room, you will begin again and again, using what you've learned and made in prior attempts. The changes you experience will be both fast and slow. Some cycles will provide immediate relief, others will take a long time for their effects to become known.
Who is this for? It is for you.
What will we do? We will make and remake our library world.