From inside the room: on efficiency, trust, and design as governance

A few years ago, I sat in on a leadership webinar about influencing. I found myself counting up which of the recommendations I’d actually find off-putting, despite their being positioned as rapport-building. From my perspective, it lacked the social and cultural nuances of other rooms I sat in.

I was there, in the room, in leadership spaces. But I was desperately hoping no one would try to influence me in those ways. Or that they’d at least ask me directly how I was most effectively influenced. It seemed rude not to ask. I’d be happy to share, for both of our sakes.

I realised how the evidence and impact I personally valued could look quite different from what others expected. I was interested in people’s stories and in understanding different types of value and context. I’d think structurally, but apply that lens to fundamentally relational questions, about power, inclusion, and sensemaking. Structural thinking in service of critical, humanities inquiry.

And that felt at odds with when efficiency was positioned as a goal in itself, rather than effectiveness or inclusion, for example.

It wasn’t that I never needed to be efficient or to flag inefficiencies, but that efficiency, as a leadership language, flattened so many of the questions and relationships that mattered, including those that might actually support it.

This isn’t only a leadership quandary, though. It’s also a design one. In ‘Designing for accessibility beyond compliance,’ Wong describes how UX principles are often shaped by values of control, efficiency, clarity, and ease of use. Wong continues:

“We design products with efficiency in mind, but what about sensitivity, emotional reassurance, and confidence? What about safety, transparency and choice? These values may conflict with what we consider to be the foundational basics of UX, but I believe these values are just as important, if not more. What is the point of enabling a user to be able to complete and submit a form online, if the process of completing that form makes the user feel incompetent and uncomfortable? What is the point of getting into the room, if the experience of the wheelchair ramp to get into the room caused you to feel inadequate?”

From a design as governance lens, our design decisions can restrict and limit choices and define different uses and possibilities. And so, we see governance as being how we control the possibilities in a ‘field of action.’ Here, design as governance requires understanding how seemingly neutral choices can shape people’s agency, as well as their more visceral experiences of a space.

The design of ‘rooms’ (physical, institutional, leadership, or otherwise) also shapes the type of trust possible within them. I’ve previously written about thin and thick trust in libraries: the difference between institutional, expectation-driven norms (thin) and the more relational, situated, community forms of trust (thick). Applied to design governance, a ‘room’ designed around efficiency and ease of use might signal access. However, it can also miss the conditions that allow thicker trust to form or deny opportunities for different uses or perspectives, particularly among communities for whom institutional trust has been broken.

Institutional or design efficiency may meet a functional need but not create the conditions for building thicker trust with communities that are sceptical of institutional intent. The problem isn’t efficiency itself; it’s when efficiency is the only value our design optimises for, or when we don’t question whose comfort or safety friction serves.

Baumhofer writes about the cost of assuming that inefficiency and design friction are inherently bad. Rather, friction can have cultural, social, and safety benefits, creating pauses that prevent harm, facilitate sensemaking, reduce misinformation, and build social trust and cohesion.

These are things we care about in libraries and other knowledge-based institutions, especially when positioned as knowledge brokers and community spaces. Knowledge brokering requires trust, as currency, and is relational. However, because knowledge brokering is relational, the type of trust depends on the communities we serve and the trust they legitimise and consider credible. It is similar to the evidence that knowledge brokers translate, in that:

“Questions of credibility and legitimacy are also critical, as what counts as “credible” evidence varies across communities. A broker working with government agencies and Indigenous groups, for example, may find that scientifically robust data is dismissed if it fails to respect cultural knowledge or past relational harms” (Cvitanovic et al., 2026).

Here, the relationality of ethical brokering requires engaging with marginalised communities and diversity in knowledge work.

But it’s possible that universal and user-centric design foundations may preclude marginalised communities when designing for the majority, create unintended second- or third-order effects, or miss qualities like dignity or safety. In participatory and community-based contexts, research designs that build trust are often those that:

• Prioritise a two-way dialogue (rather than one-way or passive information flow);
• Enhance transparency and clarity on privacy, confidentiality, protection, and anonymity;
• Recognise trust is not one-size-fits-all or an endpoint, but rather is dynamic and multifaceted; and
• Avoid stimagising self-relevant (lived experience) and shared identity research (while also resisting essentialist assumptions about identity). ¹

As such, trust serves a purpose beyond research and design outputs and requires engaging with design processes. In ‘Designing for access,’ the question is asked: “…can we assume everyone wants to ‘belong’ in the same way?”

There is an acknowledgement that oversimplifying needs can cause harm, that one design cannot work for all, and that multiple ways of participating are necessary for belonging.

Here, access and trust are experiential and sit at the intersection of design, knowledge, and governance. And these considerations allow us to move beyond whether people can access the room, to understanding how the room makes people feel while they are there.

1. Many of these studies make several recommendations, so some bullet points are repeated across studies. ↩︎