Purpose & Goals

A sensory space is a comfortable and welcoming area within any larger space that provides a calming and soothing environment for those with a variety of sensory input needs. This space allows users to center themselves in a way that is not often afforded to them. In partnership with our university’s student accessibility center, our libraries applied and received grant funding to install a sensory space on the first floor of our main campus library. In this paper, which will be published as a book chapter in a forthcoming book (published by ACRL), we detail our multistage user research project which became the foundational ground from which the sensory space was designed and developed. In particular, our paper addresses the questions: what do neurodiverse students with sensory processing characteristics need from a sensory space, and why; how do we develop a user research project that is informed by frameworks of critical disability studies; how do we challenge tokenization and exploitation of user research participants from marginalized backgrounds; and how do we meaningfully incorporate our research findings such that they have material impact?

Design & Methodology

To answer these questions, as in, to build an accessible and ethical user research project, we first drew upon multiple theoretical frameworks. This included centering the social model of disability, borne from critical disability studies, the framework of “nothing about us without us” from the disability civil rights movement, and Mia Mingus’s theories of collective access from within the disability justice movement. This theoretical grounding informed the precise research questions we developed, our strategies for participant recruitment, and the values with which we wanted to lead our interactions with students. Our research methodologies were informed not only by the aforementioned frameworks, but also through following Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles: multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, and multiple means of action & expression. Embodying these principles led to designing research methodologies that enabled verbal and non-verbal communication, synchronous and asynchronous participation, community or individual interactions, and so forth. Primarily, we utilized short and long surveys, Zoom interviews, facilitated focus groups, and asynchronous Google drive submissions based on a facilitation guide. While our methodologies yielded a large amount of data, we utilized manual qualitative data analysis methodologies such as coding by hand and thematic analysis to better synthesize the various outputs of data collected.

Findings

Our findings fell into the following large categories: expectations for any sensory space; inclusion, belonging, & visibility; comfort and safety; community building; preferences and triggers as it relates the five senses; sensory management and aids; furniture needs & spatial orientation; health privacy; rules & community guidelines. Within each category lie major themes and insights that provide us clear guidance around the material and social design of the sensory space. From the findings, material design considerations include: variations of furniture to enable modular body positions; demarcation of the space to allow for both focused studying and relaxation; building out tranquility toolkits; clear guidelines on noise, visual, and olfactory stimulation in the space; and more. Social design, based on the findings, include: community guidelines for addressing conflict; events and programming to build collective identity; and addressing issues related to health information disclosure. This is just a handful of the vast amount of findings that came from our research.

Action & Impact

Our findings directly impacted the next steps of the sensory space design, installation, policy design, and outreach. With space design, we used our findings to ensure that furniture was arranged to allow for variation of seating options and mobility navigating across a smaller space. In terms of installation, the current space we’re working with is geared towards a sensory relaxation environment, but students voiced the need for spaces for sensory stimulation and experimentation, especially by themselves. We’ve decided to renovate two individual study rooms as sensory spaces, equipped for students to customize their sensory experience. The findings reaffirmed the need for sensory kit lending for on demand use, to allow for expanded sensory soothing beyond designated spaces. We will build out digital and physical sensory kits, and work with in-person service providers to develop workflows for loaning out the latter in the library. For policy design, we leveraged our findings to convince our campus partners to expand access to the space for students identifying as neurodiverse broadly, not just students who identified as autistic– for whom the sensory space was originally conceptualized. This is a direct result of our role in challenging the medical model of disability which limits access to resources. More broadly, we can more accurately advocate for the needs of neurodiverse students with campus partners, and push for the installation of sensory spaces outside of the libraries. In terms of guidelines, we created a set of community guidelines to set expectations for the space, provide guidance on navigating conflict, and more. These guidelines have been sent back to students for additional input, solidifying a community-based feedback process. These are some of the many direct and material applications from our research, highlighting the various ways to implement findings depending on budget, staff capacity, and time.

Practical Implications & Value

Most commonly, user research is used to design responsive technology and digital products, which shapes much of the collective knowledge and practice in libraries. However, we strongly believe that user research must be shaped and applied beyond its conventional uses in the field, given that the library is a physical, social, and political space, in addition to a digital one. While this user research project was applied to the installation of a physical sensory space, we believe our research design process, methodologies, and execution can provide guidance for user research practitioners who are looking to be in community with neurodiverse students. Our work falls in line with the burgeoning field of Critical UX studies within Library and Information Sciences, which challenges the politically neutral assumptions made within user experience and assessment practices. For UX practitioners looking to develop their critical lenses, our paper presentation will provide honest and transparent learnings around an inclusive approach to user research.