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Matthew Piper LIS 7400 12/09/10

Recommendations for the

Management of the Green

Garage’s Information

Kiosk
 Introduction

This semester, each student in the Urban Libraries Seminar taught by Maria Gonzalez at
Wayne State’s School of Library & Information Science partnered with a different Detroit
nonprofit organization to help it meet some promotional information need. The outcomes-based
projects were informed by student-led seminars given throughout the term on subjects ranging
from social capital to the 21st century library to public relations and marketing. The projects
were designed to encourage students to develop a broad conception of what contemporary
urban library and information services might look like, as well as to begin the work of building
meaningful connections among area institutions in the service of a better Detroit.

My site partner was the Green Garage, a developing green business incubator whose primary
goal is to provide office/work space and resources to start-up green businesses in Detroit.
Driven by a strong sense of community and a commitment to information sharing, the Green
Garage intends to create a public information kiosk and display it on a fence at its historic
midtown location. My project was to visit other area businesses with existing public information
displays in order to learn from them and generate a set of recommendations that the Green
Garage can use as a guide to manage its kiosk.

What follows is a more detailed look at the Green Garage and my project, as well as my final list
of four broad recommendations (and several sub-recommendations for each).

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 The Green Garage

The Green Garage is an emerging green business incubator housed in a historic building in
midtown Detroit that is currently undergoing a sustainable renovation. The building, on Second
Avenue at Prentis, was originally built in 1920 and was once, among several other things, a
Model T showroom. When it re-opens as the Green Garage in early 2011, it will provide office
and workshop space for developing green businesses in Detroit, acting as one of the first major
participants in the effort to revitalize Detroit through nourishment of a nascent green economy.
The Green Garage is the vision of Tom and Peggy Brennan. It is guided by at least three
primary organizational values: sustainability, community, and history.

Sustainability
The Green Garage is committed to environmental sustainability. From its function as a space
for emergent green businesses in Detroit to the sustainable rehabilitation of the building itself,
this value underscores everything the organization does. As just one manifestation of this
value, the several-year rehabilitation project has resulted in only a single dumpster full of refuse;
all other materials from the original building have been recycled or re-purposed for use in the
renovated space. The rehabilitation has been carefully designed to result in a building that
adheres to net zero energy standards, producing no carbon and relying on natural lighting and
ventilation, geothermal heating, and re-used water for plumbing.

Community
A sense of community guides the Green Garage in several ways. For one, the project itself was
born out of community involvement, with more than 120 volunteers contributing their energies
and expertise toward conceptualizing and realizing the vision of the organization and building.
Further, the core team hosts weekly, open lunches, to which anyone is invited to learn about the
project and/or contribute their efforts. The Garage’s approach toward incubating green
businesses, too, is community-oriented, with member businesses expected to maintain mutual
stewardship over the building while they share it, and with multi-purpose spaces inside designed
to foster idea sharing. Further, a resource center to be located inside the building will be
available for use by the businesses in residence, but also by the community as a whole to learn
about sustainability on a personal level. Finally, the Green Garage is dedicated to participating
in the cultural life of midtown Detroit, opening its doors during local festivals and partnering with
other local organizations to help build a solid, tight-knit small business community in midtown.

History
The Green Garage is fully invested in understanding and documenting the history of the building
and the midtown neighborhood in which it sits. To that end, volunteers have spent many hours
researching the building (which is on the National Register of Historic Places), its previous
tenants, and the 19th-century families who lived in houses on the site before construction of the
building. Artifacts from this long history have been unearthed along the rehabilitation process,
and have been archived and published on the Green Garage’s Flickr page. Additionally, a
number of historical photographs have been uncovered, offering glimpses of the Garage and
the neighborhood through the decades; these are available on the organization’s wiki. The
Green Garage’s sense of history helps it understand both its present circumstance and Detroit’s
potential future. The Green Alley, a project developed adjacent to the building, was paved with
bricks that had once covered the building’s large windows after Detroit’s 1967 riots, a stirring
example of this historical sensibility and optimism for the future.

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 My Project

Once renovation is complete in early 2011, the Green Garage intends to mount a community
information kiosk on a fence in front of the building along Second Ave. This bulletin board-type
space will be available to the community as a place of information dissemination and exchange.
Tom and Peggy asked me to perform a study of surrounding area businesses and organizations
that have similar designated spaces for informal information sharing. The nine businesses I
studied were:

Avalon International Breads

Bronx Bar
Bureau of Urban Living
Cass Cafe
City Bird
Motor City Brewing Works
Source Booksellers
Starbuck’s
Traffic Jam & Snug

The study addressed the broad question “How does Detroit communicate informally?” More
specifically, it investigated the following, for each business studied:

What are the goals of the information spaces?

o Are they the same or different across businesses?
o Does anyone know if the goals have been met?

What is the content of the information displayed?

o Is it explicitly relevant to the business or broader in scope?
o Does someone in the organization determine what can go up? If so, who?

What is the extent of the “collection?”

o If there is a limit to the number of items that can be displayed, what is it? How is
the line drawn? Are there policies in place to govern this? Are the policies
consistent with the organizations’ goals?

How much space does the display occupy and what form does it take?
o Is information displayed in more than one place? If so, is there a meaningful
distinction between the different locations?
o Is it easily accessible?
o Is each piece of information represented by a single item that stays in the space
or are there multiple copies for customers to take away?

What is the level of interest on the part of customers? What is the shelf life or turnover
rate of the information?
o Have the businesses had feedback that the content of the information is of value
to customers?

What are the lessons learned from maintaining these collections over time?
o Are there any obvious problems with setup of the display?
o Have the businesses made any changes to its display based on prior
experience?
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In order to answer these questions and begin to understand how the Green Garage’s
information kiosk might fit into midtown’s existing informal information sharing network, I took a
three-fold approach that included observation, interviews, and research.

Observation
I visited each business several times to get a sense of the information displays: their size,
placement, and content. I was interested in attempting to determine how successful the
displays were (i.e., were people looking at them?), and in taking careful note of the extent of
each collection (e.g., how many items, what kind, how arranged?). This observation gave me
the opportunity to independently form important conclusions about the displays and their
success (or, as it turned out in some cases, lack of it).

Interviews
At the businesses, I spoke to employees or proprietors about the management of the collection
in order to get an organizational perspective on the displays. I prepared a list of questions to
ask representatives from each organization (see Appendix A), but found that the most fruitful
conversations were the ones that were ultimately allowed to develop more naturally.
Unfortunately, due to constraints on the interviewees’ and my time, these longer, free-form
conversations were few. Nonetheless, each interview yielded important information, and the
best conversations provided substantive, exciting directions for the project to take.

Research
In order to provide support for some insights, structure my recommendations in a more
thoughtful way, and draw on the work of experts, I conducted some basic research in the field of
Information Design. My original research in the literatures of Library & Information Science,
Communications, and Urban Studies yielded a disheartening dearth of information about the
public display of information. A consultation with Judith Moldenhauer in Wayne State’s Graphic
Design program, however, pointed me in the direction of Information Design, a discipline with
which I was previously unfamiliar and which proved to be strikingly relevant to the project and
quite insightful.

Together, these three strategies resulted in the following list of four final recommendations
addressed to Tom, Peggy, and the rest of the core Green Garage team. Each is discussed in
more detail in the subsequent section:

1. Use the kiosk as a way of communicating the Green Garage’s values of sustainability,
community and history.

2. Maintain an active curatorial and organizational hand in the information displayed.

3. Be prepared to accommodate documents/flyers in a variety of sizes.

4. Become an information destination.

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 Recommendations

1. Use the kiosk as way of communicating the Green Garage’s values

of sustainability, community, and history.

The kiosk will be, among much else, your introduction to the local community. For many, it will
be their first encounter with the Green Garage, and as such, is an ideal opportunity to express
(even implicitly) your core values of sustainability, community, and history.

Support

Claire at the Bureau of Urban Living makes clear her organizational values of art,
design, and support for the local businesses community by actively curating her
collection with those values in mind. She wants her information display to be of use to
her customer base, which she describes as also being interested in those things. She
uses her display, therefore, to further her organizational goals in a way that also speaks
to her customers’ interests.

Similarly, Janet at the Source Booksellers curates her display with respect to the values
of health, well-being, women’s issues and community efforts toward social justice, which
are the values she wants to promote at an organizational level. She does not allow the
display of what she terms “negative stuff,” and wanted to relate that, “You don’t want the
community to run the show” in case you end up promoting others’ values.

Avalon International Bread’s primary information display board incorporates photographs

(of children baking bread and the installation of a new oven, for example), news articles
mentioning their organization and/or the midtown neighborhood, and a “Givin’ the Local”
sign, all of which emphasize Avalon’s values of community and sustainable, local food
culture.

Emily and Andrew at City Bird and Claire at the Bureau both have special sections near
their check-out counters where they display information advertising events/organizations
about which they’re especially passionate. These informational pieces may or may not
also appear with the rest of the displayed information, but by singling them out, the
proprietors are making pointed statements about their own values.

Sub-recommendations

a. Keep your values in mind, but conceptualize them broadly so that your display is not
exclusive. Be creative in what you consider related to sustainability, community, and history in
order to be inclusive of the community.

b. Have a personal presence on the kiosk. Hang photos, news articles, award certificates, a
mission statement, etc., so that the community knows who you are and what you stand for.
Advocate for a sustainable lifestyle through informational materials that you create and share.

c. Create an additional information space inside the building that is reserved for information
about events/causes/organizations that are especially dear to you. Since the public will be
invited in through the cafe and resource center, this is another opportunity to clarify and
disseminate your values.
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2. Maintain an active curatorial and organizational hand in the
information displayed.

By making the kiosk open for the public to populate, you are inviting the good as well as the
bad. Don’t be afraid to remove materials that you find inappropriate (for whatever reason,
whether they contain off-color language/imagery or just don’t mesh with your values) or that
unnecessarily clutter your board. Entropy happens; work diligently to avoid it by regularly
scanning the kiosk and removing out-of-date information.

Support

Nearly every person I interviewed mentioned that they have no compunction about
removing materials they find inappropriate. “Inappropriate” is defined locally, so you will
need to determine what that means for the Green Garage. At Starbuck’s, for example,
inappropriate materials include anything that advertises a for-profit enterprise. At
Avalon, inappropriate just means containing offensive language or imagery. At the Cass
Cafe, it describes content not relating in some way to Detroit.

At Starbuck’s, employees scan the display between 4 and 5 times a day to look for
inappropriate material. Most other organizations do it closer to once a week. At
organizations that take a more hands-off approach, information is duplicated, out of date,
and/or hung on top of other information; the spaces have become so cluttered that
effective information transmission is all but impossible.

Space is precious, and Janet from the Source Booksellers told me that numerous people
a day typically show up with information to display, so the board will probably fill quickly.
Noted Information Design expert Edward Tufte said, “Clutter is a failure of design, not an
attribute of information” (Baer, 2008, p. 2). Chandler Screven refers to the concept of
design efficiency, or “the average time it takes viewers to find and process message-
related exhibit information” (Screven, 1999, p. 147). He reminds us that “recall and
recognition of visual information decline as the number of items on display increases” (p.
142).

Sub-recommendations

a. Have an assigned person actively scan the display at least once a week at a specific
time. Whether the responsibility falls to one individual or rotates, assigning it will ensure that it
gets done. The person should look for content that is duplicated, out-of-date, or inappropriate,
and remove it. He or she should also make sure that one piece of information does not obscure
another. (This may be especially important for you compared with other local organizations,
since because your kiosk will be outside, you will be less likely to approve materials before they
go up.)

b. Don’t be afraid to move content. If you see patterns among the information displayed (such
as in content, format, color, or size) chunk it so that like items are grouped together in a way
that catches the eye or lets it flow naturally from item to item.

c. Maximize design efficiency. Remember that if your goal is to effectively transmit information,
the fewer informational items, the better. Strike a balance between filling your kiosk and

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cluttering it. Invite the community’s participation but remember that “information overload and
clutter...scatter attention and increase fatigue” (Screven, 1999, p. 147) and that, “The goal of
communication-oriented design of messages should always be clarity of communication”
(Petterson, 2002, p. ix).

3. Be prepared to accommodate documents/fliers in a variety of

sizes.

From business cards to full-sized posters, the information I observed on the various display
surfaces came in a great variety of sizes. Different organizations have devised different ways to
accommodate this based on their particular space constraints and opportunities.

Support

Janet at the Source Booksellers simply does not allow the display of large posters. She
only devotes a small table to the display of information and the table does not
accommodate anything much larger than 8 ½” x 11”.

At the Cass Cafe, employees have devised a system for collocating materials of similar
sizes. Their information table contains exclusively postcard-sized fliers or smaller; 8 ½’’
x 11’’-sized (or thereabouts) fliers are displayed on the surface of the counter behind and
above the table; posters are hung from the counter.

Motor City Brewing Works has installed recessed shelving to house its collection of
postcard and business card-sized materials. There is a freestanding rack for larger, mid-
sized materials, and posters are hung on the wall.

Avalon, which accepts almost everything the community wants to display, initially had
one bulletin board and decided to add another to accommodate the ever-increasing
amount of information. Even with two, the information items cannot be contained on the
two boards, and many larger items have by necessity been hung on the walls.

Sub-recommendations

a. The large size of the Green Garage’s kiosk is probably in your favor here. Consider
accepting fliers/posters of all sizes for a time and see how it goes.

b. If the large-sized posters end up taking up too much space, consider asking community
members to supply smaller-sized versions. My observations made clear that in most cases
when an individual or organization has gone to the trouble of producing large posters, they’ve
also printed smaller versions for wider distribution.

c. You may also want to consider enforcing a size ban based on the constraints of the kiosk
and the number of materials displayed at one time. Alternatively, you may consider enforcing a
“1 or 2 posters at a time” rule.

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4. Become an information destination.

When the Green Garage opens, it will be the hub of sustainable innovation in Detroit, and will be
the city’s green heart. Capitalize on that distinction by drawing Detroit’s visitors to your
organization as their introduction to understanding and visiting the green initiatives throughout
the city.

Support

Claire at the Bureau told me about a bulletin board in a coffee shop in her former
Brooklyn neighborhood. Any time community members wanted to rent, lease, buy, or
sell an apartment, they knew to visit the coffee shop to post their information or see what
others had posted. Based on the numbers of visitors to her midtown store who have
said, “We’re from out of town. Where are the urban farms?”, she envisioned something
comparable at the Green Garage: a one-stop information destination that would point
people asking similar questions in the right direction.

One particular book about international Information Design, the Information Design
Workbook, has a special case study section on the re-branding and re-imagining of
Detroit through thoughtfully-designed maps. “How can a city adopt a new way of
thinking of itself?” the book asks, and then answers, “Information design has helped”
(Baer, 2008, p. 29). See Appendix B for an example of a simple, bold map designed by
California-based Applied Storytelling to help create “a new sense of shared identity and
purpose for Detroit residents and businesses” (p. 29).

Sub-recommendations

a. Design and prominently display a simple, eye-catching map that plots out the city’s urban
farms, greenways, sustainable developments, green businesses/community organizations,
bicycle shops, etc., as well as the routes that connect them. This map could be a permanent
feature of your kiosk, only coming down when new, more current versions are made to replace
it.

b. Include future developments on the map (clearly distinguished as such) that are likely to
succeed. Use the map to drum up excitement and show your support for the M-1 light rail line,
the Southwest Detroit Greenway, and other efforts.

c. Print smaller-sized versions of the map for visitors to take with them, and hang them from the
kiosk for easy accessibility.

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 Concluding Thoughts

The conversations I had with representatives from the various organizations made several
things quite clear: the midtown business community is thrilled to welcome the Green Garage as
a new neighbor and is looking eagerly forward to seeing, contributing to, and referring people to
its information kiosk. My interviews, observations, and research also revealed that the kiosk will
be unique not only in its size and public accessibility, but also in the thoughtful approach the
Green Garage team intends to take to manage its content. While numerous Detroit businesses
have elected to make information available through some sort of public display, none of the nine
I studied has approached the undertaking as carefully as the Green Garage has. Perhaps as a
result, some of the businesses’ displays suffer from problems of entropy, disorganization, lack of
currency, and lack of focus.

Over the course of working on this project, it became apparent that the Green Garage team can
learn much from others’ successes and failures, as well as from the insights of experts, in the
service of designing and managing their information display. You have the opportunity to
design a singularly effective, vibrant, and targeted information space that will make a significant
contribution to -- and ultimately improve -- midtown Detroit’s informal information sharing
network. I hope that the recommendations outlined above will provide a stimulating and robust
point of departure for the realization of that vision.

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 References

Baer, K. (2008). Information design workbook. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers, Inc.

Petterson, R. (2002). Information design: an introduction. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins

North America.

Screven, C.G. (1999). Information design in informal settings: Museums and other public
spaces. In R. Jacobson (Ed.), Information design (pp. 131-186). Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

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 Appendix A

List of questions asked of representatives from each business

Who is responsible for managing the content of your information display?

Can anyone put up anything?

If not, how do you decide what can go up?

Do pieces of information have to be approved before they can be hung up?

How often do you scan the board for out-of-date or inappropriate material?

How do you define “inappropriate?”

Has anyone told you that they’ve attended an event or used a service based on information they
found on your display?

Are there formal policies governing the display?

Are there particular goals you intend your display to meet?

Do you consider your display successful?

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 Appendix B

Map example

Downtown Detroit district map

Copyright 2010 Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau

http://www.visitdetroit.com/downtownd/mapdowntownd

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