To kick off the beginning of December, I spent almost of week of it in a mall. Granted, that mall was connected to a hotel and a hotel convention center for a conference I was attending, but I did spend a lot of time with recycled mall air and the sounds of people shopping for holiday gifts. I was attending ARL’s Library Assessment Conference down in Houston, TX. A big reason for my attendance was to co-present on a participatory design project I helped with at Penn State (and was a parallel design project with our collaborators at Montana State). I co-presented with Scott Young and it was a great opportunity to talk about our work with Native American and first-generation students at our institutions.