ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development of the collaborative solutions team in the EdLab. The Collaborative Solutions Group was a team that came together to provide consulting services to groups of library patrons needing assistance. This team grew out of the observation that the library offered a range of services to individuals, but did not provide assistance to groups of students, faculty, or administrators, particularly assistance collaborating on projects. The Collaborative Solutions Group was assembled from members of other teams whenever a project required particular attention, and it became a key mechanism for assessing the needs of patron groups and marshalling EdLab resources to address them. The Collaborative Solutions Group offered a range of consulting services organized as joint sessions of the EdLab team members and the members of the patron team. These included problem definition sessions, research sessions, focused critique sessions, group ideation sessions, and design sessions. Over time, the Collaborative Solutions Group developed a format for design events that brought patron groups together for extended collaborative work on a problem. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the design event format, examples of design events, and the more general lessons to be drawn from this work.
