Podcast: Empowering Others With Design Thinking

POSTED February 8, 2021

Coreen and Tim talked about

• What Ledger8760 does and how large energy consumers trade that energy [0:26]

• How energy purchasing works and could affect us as individuals [3:29]

• Deep diving and getting up to speed as a marketer in a new industry [4:43]

• Communicating with a designer about their work and process, and finding non-precious ways to visualize ideas [8:22]

• Writing in non-digital ways [11:25]

• How Coreen became a designer [13:56]

• Coreen’s experience working at IDEO [17:06]

• Advertisement [22:34]

• Foundational design elements that Coreen teaches her design students at the University of Washington [23:01]

• What it means to truly be helping a client [27:32]

• Quantifying your long-term impact on a client’s business [29:37]

• Coreen’s passion project, Repair Cycle. The need to change our relationship to our clothes and the waste we produce.  [31:02]

References

• Eastlake Coffee and their typewriter

• Stephanie Burns - Founder and former Executive Director of Visual Art Institute (VAI) in Salt Lake City, UT. (i.e. The visual art institute Coreen went to as a kid)

• Karen Cheng - One of Coreen’s professors in grad school who had the class take notes soley by hand.

• Tim Brown - Former CEO, Current Chair of IDEO

• Sandy Speicher - CEO of IDEO

• Dear Sugar with Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond

• Design Principle Discussed

  • Gestalt Principles of Design

  • Visual Perception

  • Dieter Rams

• David Duyker - Coreen’s partner in Repair Cycle

Podcast Transcript

Tim Yeadon 0:13

Let's give this a shot. I'll go ahead and introduce you.

Coreen Callister 0:15

Okay.

Tim 0:16

Coreen Callister is the Product Design Director at Ledger8760. You're also an adjunct faculty at the University of Washington, where you've taught both design and research.

Tim 0:26

So I was looking around for a good description of Ledger8760, and on LinkedIn, I ran into "a data-driven energy and sustainability services company and technology platform. Cleaning and powering tomorrow's grid.” Could you describe that to me, what that means?

Coreen 0:44

Absolutely, I'll try my best to break it down. It's something that I struggled to do a little bit because... for a lot of exciting reasons, we are sort of the first product of its kind in the energy space. So I often feel like I have to kind of talk about energy market and figure out... Because before joining Ledger, I didn't know about this ecosystem and how it all works.

There are huge power traders, sort of functioning in the way that wall street functions. You have a broker who's going out into what's called the energy imbalance market every day. If you're a large business, or you're a casino and you're over or under on your scheduled power, you have to pick up the phone and call somebody and say, "Hey, I need more power", or "Hey, can you sell my excess power?" Which you can imagine has been incredibly volatile in the space of COVID. Big hospitality companies like hotels, for example, that are used to using tons of power, like giant loads of megawatt hours per day that are very expensive. Where, you know, electricity is actually often their largest expense as an organization. They are having to dial back their energy usage and try to sell that in the market. Some of these contracts for energy last five years. So I have my base power of what I think I need to run my casino no matter what, and then I have market products, that I'll go out and buy to sort of add or subtract from that.

And actually, until now, it's all been done in spreadsheets, which is really crazy. So the founders of Ledger, Josh Griffin, and Josh Weber, who I work with every day are actually folks who used to represent clients, in these kind of arbitrage cases. Where someone would find an error in a spreadsheet that happened over the course of maybe four or five years, that little mistake can add up to millions of dollars and power that was either not served or underserved. And taking that into a court scenario was just a nightmare.

And so what our software tries to do, and our platform is, actually visualizes energy. So those loads, those products that I'm talking about on an hour by hour basis. So that energy managers and sustainability directors actually have insight and transparency for the first time, data visualization, not just spreadsheets, so they can look at what their utilities looking like and say, "Hey, like, I didn't get that power I bought" or "Oh, I need more, let me pick up the phone and try to figure out how to make that happen". Because temperature and humidity, for example, have huge impacts on whether people are going to use power. So if everybody in Nevada, like "it's really hot", and they go crank up their AC at the same time, then everybody's got to figure out how to pull those levers and meet that demand.

Tim 3:29

Interesting. So I mean, a municipality would probably be purchasing as a group. Whereas I'm a homeowner, I live in Ballard. Can I opt out and purchase it at my own rate?

Coreen 3:42

Well, there's all these exciting things happening where people are using their own solar on site, there's even a future or a world in which maybe you as Tim could offset and sell your solar energy back into the grid. Those systems don't exist quite yet. But that's a place we might get to where there could be a consumer market where you're actually trading energy as an individual.

Tim 4:05

I want to say 15 years ago, or so I helped write a website for a company called Southwest Wind Power that would place like a windmill in your backyard. And I remember this being part of it, that for some periods of time you could be off the grid, and basically not using energy and just using your own, but if there was excess, it could be transferred elsewhere.

Coreen 4:27

Right. I guess Let me ask you a question. Like after it goes elsewhere, what was your understanding of what happened to that energy? Because I think that's the part that's most confusing is, like, where does it go? Where the electrons flow? Right?

Tim 4:43

Yeah, I don't know. (laughs) But I do want to say that this is probably one of the most wonderful things about what we do in that we get to do deep dives into different types of businesses, different industries, and you never really always know where you're gonna land. It could be wind power, it could be energy, it could be organic farming. At the moment, we're working on a site for automated indoor farming controls.

Coreen 5:13

Cool.

Tim 5:14

There are many disparate pieces of hardware that an indoor farmer currently uses. And there's nothing specifically that's affordable to an entry-level farmer that they can tie everything together. They can for a large amount of money, but not for less. And so to sit here, and you get to describe to me, I mean... probably the last time I chatted with you was six months or so. And in the last six months, you've got to do a deep dive on energy. I mean, what a great advertisement for why to become a designer.

Coreen 5:42

I think you really said it. It's like maybe that's the thing that draws me to design the very most actually. I always feel like I'm more of a researcher at the end of the day, and the output happens to be something visual, right? But I love, love, love. And this is my first time at Ledger working in-house, I've worked as a consultant exclusively in design. So exactly what you said, you know, you have two months, two months, two weeks. Quick, go become an expert on this random thing. And that's actually what you get to do as a podcaster, too. And I think I did some audio storytelling in my thesis in grad school. And I think, again, if you're drawn to design, you're actually probably just a little anthropologist or journalist on the inside that wants to understand something about how the world works, and keep doing that process. It's so rewarding.

Tim 6:34

I love going down rabbit holes and learning everything I can about a business, and we get paid to do it. It's absurd.

Coreen 6:41

I know! They are like, we will let the designer in the room because they have to make something out of all of this. So you get to be privy to all of these conversations. Maybe we should have a trivia night of designers and see, like, what random knowledge there is.

Tim 6:56

So you joined Ledger, when?

Coreen 6:59

I joined Ledger in April 2019. So last spring?

Tim 7:04

What is the process for getting up to speed at a fairly technical company like that?

Coreen 7:09

It's been pretty organic. I'm the only designer. And I also joined before we had a director of product, so somebody who manages the product process. I was sort of sharing that role with our CEO, who's very invested in the day to day. We run an agile process. And that's actually really helpful for the structure because there's so... I've never done formal product management, but I had to kind of step into that role with him. And I think it allowed me that just, for better or worse, drink from a firehose.

And again, that is what we have to do as designers. You always have that moment where you first start up, like, "Oh, I don't know if I can do this", like, I really felt like a fish out of water. And then somehow, you do it. And you just have to say, "okay, I've done this before I can do it again, I can learn this". It's a process that I feel grateful to keep repeating. And being with founders who are so patient and actually quite visual. Our CEO, Josh, does a lot of graph paper sketches that he'll just throw down and send me and that really helps me get my brain around how this data should actually look and come to life.

Tim 8:21

Yeah. More real time, low-fi sketching is really useful between people. Even if I sketch things out, and I text it to a designer, and we're on a call together. Because there's no way I can hold a piece of paper up to this camera and have anybody see anything. I for one thing can't seem to get a piece of paper in front of the camera directly. It's always off to the side. And I'm like, "do you see it?" And they're like "I don't see anything".

Coreen 8:47

And that's a different process than even using like, Figma, right? Like, I can get them to sketch something, take a picture and text it to me. But if I'm like, "Oh, look, we can all see each other's cursors and we are in the same digital space, there's this sort of aversion to it. It's interesting.

Tim 9:02

Yeah these tools, that at the beginning of the pandemic, I think a lot of people were really... I think they thought they're gonna become super popular. But in the end, I still find myself sketching on a piece of paper and texting it to people. And it could be that I got locked in on that 10 years ago, and that's just the way life is gonna be for me, you know?

Coreen 9:18

I don't know, I think that there's something well... First of all, what we know, and when I teach my students it's really just like this, and I had no control over it teaching online during the pandemic. But I have a rule that I learned from one of my favorite professors in grad school, Karen Chang. And this was not an arbitrary rule. It's based in research. To take notes by hand, which makes sense in a design class.

Because what happens when we give students laptops or even tablets, is typing is not a visual activity, even scrolling around with a mouse or with your finger. You're not as generative and you're a lot less precious when you're just using a pen and paper. But there's something about when it gets onto a screen that feels really formal and feels like harder to edit, or remove, less organic. And actually, there's different parts of our brain that light up when we're writing versus when we're typing. And there's been all these studies, as Karen always highlights when she introduces this rule at the beginning of class, which I totally stole from her, that you remember things, you encode things more deeply when you write them with your hand than if you type them.

And so it's just a no brainer to me that if you're giving a lecture, students, distractions of social media on the screen that you can't see aside, even seeing somebody next to you, as a peer who has their laptop or their phone open is a visual distraction. But if everyone's devices are down, and all you do are listen or maybe take notes with your hands, the learning is so much deeper, it really, really is. So we have a sketchbook requirement.

We want that first thumbnail ideation and that bias toward non-precious ways of trying to visualize ideas. Because as designers, that's what you have to do if you are the only designer in the room, is you have to have enough creative confidence to get up on that whiteboard or pull out your sketchbook and say, "Is this what you're talking about?" And have people kind of talk around that artifact, even if it's really low fi. And doing that on a screen just has its limitations I think ultimately.

Tim 11:25

Yeah, that's really interesting. I often on first drafts will stand up at the whiteboard and write them out, or sketch them out. It's almost there as visual as anything. If I can get an outline, then maybe I have a fighting chance. Writing isn't easy to look at, to watch somebody try to do it. I do take notes on my laptop.

Something that I've introduced into my life in the last couple of years are typewriters, in which there's no screen and they draw from you versus push anything at me. there is nothing that's going to happen until I add energy to the thing. I have one next to the desk here (at home) and at my office, I have one next to my desk. I write short scripts on them, sometimes I just work through the day, if I have a handful of things I need to figure out.

But A) I taking things apart and putting them back together, typewriter. Then B) I like working on typewriters. And they're these fascinating, beautifully designed things. The idea of writing by hand or taking notes by hand is also compelling. And I found that I've lost that over time. When I was reporter I could keep up with you. Like every word you said I could transcribe as I went, and then add a sketch or you know, notations and now I feel like I've lost that, and probably just from lack of repetitiveness, just, I just don't do it.

Coreen 12:48

Right? Or it's sort of what, what does the world require of you right now, if you're collaborating with folks who expect to see content in a Google Doc. It's an extra step to take it from a written place into that space. And I love what you said about not having anything pushed at you, I think that mindset is so important. If you're creating something. It's like the physical artifact, looking at a typewriter, which is older and has history and moving parts to it. That is fundamentally maybe going to shape different content or output than a keyboard would.

Tim 13:23

Yeah, there's no screen. And it's, it's wonderful. And it's so quiet. Except for when you're banging on the keys which is very satisfying.

Coreen 13:31

There's a typewriter at the coffee shop in Eastlake Union, Eastlake Coffee, and they've had it there for years, it just sits off to the side where the barista brings your drink up. And it's one of my favorite things in Seattle, because you go over there and you can just see little notes or poems that people have written down. And sometimes they change the ink color or whatever.

Tim 13:51

Oh, yeah, everything looks beautiful on a typewriter. It's true.

Coreen 13:55

Yeah.

Tim 13:56

Tell me how you became a designer. Where did you, where did you grow up? And was there a moment that led you to doing this?

Coreen 14:04

Oh, yeah. The first thing that came to my brain when you said, How did you become a designer was by accident, I think. But the more that I practice design, and I say practice, because my dad's a PA, he's a doctor, and he always calls it practicing medicine. And when I ask him, "Are you going to retire?" You know, he's 68. He says, "Well, I've made every mistake in the book. And now I feel like I'm kind of at the top of my game, and I'm enjoying that." And they call it practicing medicine for a reason. I sort of wish that we would talk about it that way from a designer perspective as well. Because no matter what industry you're gonna dive into, whether it's in house or consulting, you kind of have this rougher runway or the sort of predictable learning curve. And I think we get better at approaching that takeoff and landing kind of every time.

But I grew up in Salt Lake City, and I begged my mom for art classes since I was a little kid and so I was lucky enough to go almost every day after school and do fine art. We did this thing called imagination drawing. And it was amazing to me actually, as kids because there were some rambunctious kids in my after-school art program, you know, classic kind of ADHD, can't sit still. And this woman, Stephanie Burns, who founded the visual art institute where we went, she would put on classical music, and she would leave the room and she would set a timer for 30 minutes. And we weren't allowed to talk, and we had to sit there and just draw. I think it was the greatest gift I've ever received because it allowed me a moment to learn how to focus and I actually saw these other kids focus. And two, because I think they knew we got to play dodgeball later (laughs) so she knew enough about kids that, "okay, they can't do this forever. But let's have this quiet time."

And I really hope that there are spaces like that for children now because not only did we have that internal moment of, "I'm going to just be in my own zone and kind of focus in." But we actually did critique even at, this was like, age seven or eight. We would pin up our imagination drawings, and we had to pick somebody's to talk about, and then they would pick somebody. And it was amazing. It sort of helped me feel like more comfortable putting work up.

I didn't know about design until after college because I continued with art and psychology as my majors and then accidentally ended up at IDEO, after feeling a little burned out working in nonprofits in San Francisco. And I was like, "Oh, I think this is the thing I've been interested in." The design research, the human centered focus, making decisions that are not technology, looking for a problem to solve, but really based in in human centered research, and those insights being translated into design decision, putting up work, that is not precious, letting people participate and talk about it and pick it apart and iterate quickly, and put up rough prototypes, like I just totally fell in love with it. And then from there, I ended up going to grad school for interaction design.

Tim 17:06

For people who don't know about IDEO, or even, just tell me about that agency, because I've stared at the website. And I know that people love IDEO. And there's wonderful resources on there.

Coreen 17:17

Yeah, it's interesting, because I didn't know that IDEO was a really famous design consultancy, perhaps one of the most coveted places to work for designers until I was there. I sort of showed up to my interview and was like, "I don't know what design thinking is, I don't know what you guys to do but I'm interested." And I think maybe that's how I got in because I truly didn't have any context for where they sat in the world of innovation or creative consulting.

So IDEO is a global creative design firm. They are a consultancy, which means that they work in a project-based way. Although I know they've been kind of playing with that model since I left. I was there about four and a half years. They're doing more retainer-based work. So kind of embedding the clients for maybe a year or more or vice versa, to really support things like transformational change at an organizational design level.

Our CEO at the time was a product designer by training, Tim. And now the CEO is Sandy Speicher, who has a strong background in education. And so I think depending on who the leadership is you see a different focus, in both the process and approach, but also the types of work. So you're seeing IDEO move from an agency that helped design the first computer mouse, which really put them on the map, to not having as many industrial designers on staff and moving into a space that's kind of uncharted. Where they're taking the creative process and applying it to larger organizational change projects.

So they're competing with more of like the Deloittes and McKinseys now. Like "okay, how do we actually look at the culture at an organization? And how can we help shape that in a positive way?" Or, "can we design a school system from the ground up in Peru?" So really, really large, hairy challenges where design can get a little bit blurred in terms of the definition. But they're hiring really smart people who are design researchers with PhDs, who are business designers with MBAs from some of the top programs and with really strong management consulting backgrounds who bring both qualitative and quantitative research into the design process, and building teams in a bespoke way around each project as it requires.

Tim 19:41

There's always a call for groups of people willing to do difficult things. To sit down and listen to a riddle and come up with an answer, or come up with a path ahead.

Coreen 19:51

Yeah, yeah.

Tim 19:53

That sounds like IDEO, sort of just wanders down that path and where the riddles take it is where they will be.

Coreen 20:01

Yeah. And it's interesting, I worked in business development in my first role there, and for the majority of being there other than just organically shifting into a design research role. But my job... one of my early jobs was literally answering the phone. So we had a phone number, I don't even know if they still do, where people could call and say, "I have this problem, I'm the CEO of MGM," or, "I have this problem, I am a random inventor in Dubai, I heard you can solve it. So can you please call me back?" And I would have to call them back and do the first...

This was like, relying back on my early training, picking up the phone at a mental health clinic in San Francisco for anybody that called. Trying to triage and understand what the problem was so that I could connect them to the right resource. And doing this at IDEO was actually not super different. It was a lot of listening, a lot of note taking, and trying to understand. "Okay, is there a problem here that actually might be a good fit for us?" And most of the time, I had to find really generous ways to say no, and connect them with like, an alum who had left IDEO that could maybe still work with them in a specific content way, or for a little less of a fee. But every once in a while, you would get something really cool coming through the door, like, "Hey, this is the city of San Francisco, and we're trying to put together an Olympic bid. Can you call us back?" And they're like, "Hmm, we've never done that before. But yeah, let's try it!"

Tim 21:35

Just a hotline where people call you up, and hope you'll solve their problems. I've never really considered that. Just putting a hotline up and um-

Coreen 21:44

it's like Dear Sugar or something, right? It's like late night radio, Sleepless in Seattle, kind of. (laughs)

Tim 21:51

I don't know what that is.

Coreen 21:52

Dear Sugar is... What's her name? I'm gonna mess this up. We're gonna have to look it up later. But it's people anonymously writing her and saying, should I leave my husband? Or I have this crazy neighbor or whatever. And she would respond, and everyone would get to read it. I want to say it's Cheryl Strayed who wrote the book about the Pacific Crest Trail, but I'd have to check. Or Sleepless in Seattle, where the kid calls and says "find my dad, a wife", and everyone is sobbing, the mom has died, and like, it's all public.

Editor’s note: Cheryl Strayed is the author of Dear Sugar

Tim 22:27

Yeah, I think just to track the questions is interesting enough.

Coreen 22:32

(laughs) Yeah

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Tim 23:01

Since IDEO you wouldn't got a grad degree after that. And then you've been teaching also, I suppose part time?

Coreen 23:08

Yep.

Tim 23:08

On top of a full time job.

Coreen 23:10

Mhmm

Tim 23:11

As a teacher at the University of Washington, and you've taught design and research, what are some foundational things that designers heading out as professionals should know?

Coreen 23:22

That's a great question. I mean, design is such a broad and inclusive, hopefully more inclusive every day, field. I teach in the Human Centered Design and Engineering department at UW. Actually I received my grad degree from the School of Art, History and Design. And they pull in resources from the department I graduated in, in to their visual design class, they only teach one in HCDE, it's mostly students who want to be product managers, or data scientists, or maybe UX researchers. And so they don't have one class, or one sort of path for visual design. So it's a lot to try to pack in.

What I do is help them think about a design system. So they learn all of the really basic visual principles. They learn about Gestalt Principles, they learn about visual perception. And then they start to build the foundational pieces of a brand. So they design a logo, they learn about typography, tone, color, and they put all of that together into redesigning or refreshing a brand for a local nonprofit. And they get this nice little book at the end that they can put into their portfolios. But my hope is that through that process, they're sort of figuring out where they want to participate. Because you can't do everything, and most of these students won't become visual designers. But what's super important is that they learn the difference between what is good design and what isn't.

And there is actually a really important way to talk about that. I mean, you can look at Dieter Rams' definition, right, of what is good design, there is sort of these lists or frameworks out there. But they need to be able to develop their own definition of what is good design and actually be able to articulate that. So the goal of the class is really to develop a visual vocabulary so that whether they end up getting really excited about visual design and taking kind of a slight turn and moving down that path, or they are a developer, they can participate in a conversation around critique to articulate why they don't think something is working.

And it's the same reason that I had to take a coding class and totally flail through it and hate it. So that when I work with developers now I have more empathy for their process. And also maybe a little bit of- it's like learning a new language, a way to understand, "Okay, I think this is what they're talking about". Ask smarter questions. Honestly, have a bit of a bullshit detector as well. People should have that for visual designers too. So it's sort of like exposure more than anything. But helping folks, ultimately come up with what they think good design is, or even great design.

And I would hope that the environment plays a role in that. Like, if you look at Dieter Rams' principles of good design, he's an industrial designer, which the output of a lot of design there, unfortunately ends up in landfills, because it's physical products. He talks about good design, being good for the planet, being long lasting, being simple, being something that everyone can understand. And so these are principles that I hope that they learn or come up with their own definitions of, to help them figure out how to have those conversations with multidisciplinary teams.

Tim 26:43

Doesn't it feel like a curriculum that every person in school should learn regardless of where they're headed?

Coreen 26:50

Yeah. (laughs) I mean, it's participating in the creative process.

Tim 26:56

I think a lot of my usefulness came once I began to study other disciplines and have a sense of how other disciplines intersected with each other. Having a better sense of design, dev, and your comment about bullshit detection is useful also. I may not know how to solve it, but I often know what reasonable and achievable solutions could be. And is there a path to get there? That alone, that's half my day, I feel like. Just conversations of like, "what does the solution look like? And what's a reasonable way of getting there?"

I read recently, politics and elections are a lot like transit, in which they take you a little ways along the correct direction, they don't get you exactly where you want to go. And sometimes I feel like the design process and working with clients that way. We want to move the ball down the field, to use another bad analogy. But-

Coreen 27:47

No, it's true. I think that's great.

Tim 27:50

Yeah, it's a long slow negotiation.

Coreen 27:52

Yeah.

Tim 27:53

And there's no winning just keep moving forward. It's just sort of an interesting thing you get to do every day in this business.

Coreen 28:02

Yeah, well, I think what you said is really important, it's like, the definition of winning may be fuzzy or undefined. But playing on the field or the teamwork that happens, or the learning that happens, learning how to fail, learning how to try things differently, understanding people's strengths on the team, across clients, to create a service. It's really about coaching and supporting each other.

Like, the client is helping you understand their industry, they're the subject matter expert. Your job is to empower them with creative skills, so that when you leave the project, they can take those outputs forward. Or they've learned something new, they've got some skill around, or less of a fear around maybe sketching or whatever you want to say. So that their process is different. The way that they tackle problem solving is hopefully more creative.

And I think that was really what IDEO was trying to do with 'design thinking' at the most foundational level. The end deliverable wasn't the visual thing, or the deck, or the rendering or the tech packs, or how the product is manufactured. But really, the value is in going through a creative process in-depth and learning how to replicate that moving forward, if it makes sense to that client in the future. Learning a different approach to problem solving. So that you come up with hopefully more innovative solutions.

Tim 29:26

I think the one thing clients generally want is improvement. There's some thing they want to improve in. And just this process has helped quite a bit.

Coreen 29:34

Yeah. Yeah.

Tim 29:35

I may not have perfectly figured out that question.

Coreen 29:39

(laughs) No, it's interesting, though. The thing that IDEO got criticized for the most when I worked there, or the big hard question in the room was, "Well, how do you prove what your impact is?" like, cool, we get to go through this inspirational process where everyone learns a lot and gets inspired and has a lot of fun, and gets to know each other and all these great things. But once you guys leave, and we have this thing at the end, whether it's a service or an experience or product, how do you know like, what's your track record? Did more people buy it? Did more people get better in the hospital? Whatever it was. And we were so ineffective at tracking that long term impact, and yet, we would still have people calling every single day. Can you help me? Can you help me? So I have to believe that the process was the product at the end of the day. Even if there wasn't anybody to tracking all of the impact.

Tim 30:31

That makes perfect sense. I feel like, did we get together and do the best that we could and help you improve as much as we could, at this time with the info we had and the time that we had. And if you do that that's respected, and they are left with a good feeling about the process. And it's sort of that residual feeling about the process that really, you know... I tried everything I could, this is where we're at. And we'll try it again. And I feel like that's what we do for clients.

Coreen 31:03

Mm-hmm. I like that.

Tim 31:04

One other question for you, I saw that you have a passion project called Repair Cycle?

Coreen 31:10

(laughs) Yeah.

Tim 31:10

And I wanted to ask you about this. And I know that the pandemic has slowed it down a little bit. But in essence, I was looking at Instagram, and I have a bicycle, and a trailer and a sewing machine. And what happens after that?

Coreen 31:24

(laughs) What happens after that! You know, once you have a bike trailer, then everyone has an idea. What is it after that? Is it a mobile coffee shop? Is it a repair station? So repair cycle was really fun. My friend David Duyker, he was an undergrad senior at UW at the same time I was graduating from the grad program. And he showed up at the grad studio one day, which was kind of bold for undergrads, like they never came upstairs, right? And he like, comes over to my desk and he goes, "are you Coreen? And I'm like, "Yes, hello." And he said, "my friend Adam told me to come find you because I heard that you're passionate about clothing waste, or reusing clothing and trying to find a way to build a circular economy around textiles. And I'm building a bike trailer. And I think that it should be a place that people can repair their clothing, I worked at Patagonia as a retail associate and as somebody who repaired clothes,"

Patagonia is famous for this with their worn wear tour, they took this giant, beautifully built wooden trailer, slash van. And they put in all of these people who were repair techs and drove them around the intermountain west had people sign up to bring their well loved Patagonia stuff to them. And they just sold out everywhere. I mean, they couldn't keep up with the demand. And so there is a market for people who want to keep their clothing longer. And the process in which people learn to repair things like they'd sit with these techs, and they'd sit with us at our bike trailer and watch us, just even learn how to sew on a button, was really part of the product. Sure they get their jacket patched or their jeans fix and hemmed. But they also got to learn how to do that.

So the idea was that they could maybe go home and figure out how to darn their socks. And that's through that process, you build a different relationship with your clothing. You invest in it differently, you make different buying decisions about companies that have higher quality products, or who are hopefully more sustainable in their supply chain. Because the thing that blows my mind is there's no straightforward way to recycle clothing. It either goes in the landfill as solid waste, or it goes in the incinerator.

And then people will say, oh, but if you bring it to Goodwill, or you send it to an organization that ships that overseas, like they'll use it. And sure, it might have more reuse that might get turned into rags, it might be something that somebody else wears again, but it's still solid waste on the planet. And it's heavy. And it's a physical thing that we make a lot of through fast fashion practices and through getting tired of things and then it ends up in the landfill or it ends up as carbon emission. So we have to figure out how to have a different relationship with our clothes.

So David and I, for his senior project, built this really cool bike trailer out of recycled wood and metal that he welded together and we like hitched it up to the bike. And then he had this sewing machine from his grandmother who was Dutch and it's beautiful and it's this artifact that people see it from across a square when we're working outside or you know, any event space. And you just see people want to come to it. It is like that typewriter sort of magic, like what is this old machine?

Tim 34:50

It looks like an old Singer, like a foot pedal singer or something like that.

Coreen 34:54

Yeah, it's over 100 years old and it still works. And it's hand crank operated, actually.

Tim 35:02

Yeah, things like that still work great. If you just need a straight stitch of various lengths. You're in a great spot with a singer like that. It'll last forever.

Coreen 35:10

Yeah, it's totally bulletproof. I mean, we put it on the bike trailer and biked over the bridge to the King County alternative county fair out in Redmond. And it made it. I mean it made it on a ship here from Holland at some point. And yeah, it's pretty cool. So yeah, you hand crank it and it starts going as you make your straight stitches. It is such a beautiful machine and easy enough to repair because the components themselves are well made. So then a fun little beacon for our project.

Tim 35:43

There are layers to what you're describing. People, I think, have a hunger to make things with their hands, and to learn things. And they enjoy, sort of demystifying how a button is sewn on. It's a break from the screen in our regular life. And you get to sit down and use a different part of your brain. And you daydream about it later. And you sort of long to do more of it. Even if you don't really get into the thing. But that description you have people see the old sewing machine, they come up to take a look, they sit with you, you repair something, they enjoy the process. And that residual feeling in their brain that's left behind is a very positive thing. And it's similar to I think, a well-executed design process, what you're describing at IDEO. That alone of just knowing I sat down and we did the best we could, and I feel okay about that. We didn't half-ass this one. It's such a, such a satisfying thing.

Coreen 36:42

Totally it's the demystification or seeing a physical or some sort of transformation happen. Whether it's a change in thinking, an aha moment or sewing together fabric, right? That is a very satisfying experience to have

Tim 36:59

I one time removed cuffs from a dress shirt, shorten the sleeves and sewed the cuffs back on. Like, 27 YouTube videos later, and I was very proud of that. Probably never do that again. I probably will do that again.

Coreen 37:13

It's hard to do. I mean, what's so cool is seeing how many people were making their own masks. I mean, how is it that everybody had a mask? Well, before you could walk into like a target and buy them? People were making them and they were at home, it's super industrious, and most of the guys - and I don't mean to, like, boil it down to gender. But there were a lot of industrial designers in the undergrad program that were interested in soft goods design. Like wanted to go work for an REI or a Mountain Hardware. And they would learn to sew from their grandmother's, and then they'd get really excited about taking that craft forward. And so it's great to see that happen through design and across generations and across genders. It's a very democratic thing to do. And we all wear clothes. It's our second skin. So it's like, this universal thing we can really talk about and it's a good conversation piece.

Tim 38:05

Yeah, the idea of gender identifying with sewing always irritates me. So I've built numerous boats, and I sew the sails for each boat. And I've had guys come up to me, like at a show and say, "who sewed your sails?" I said, "I did it myself." And I was like, "you could do it too". And the look on their faces like "I don't sew". And I'm like, and I just think to myself, you're a fool who's limiting yourself in life. Because a sewing machine is just as cool as a bandsaw.

Coreen 38:35

Absolutely, my dad taught me to sew because he did stitches. So I remember the first time I sat down with a needle and thread was sewing up a stuffed animal with a hole in it. And he taught me sutures, you know. So it can come from anywhere.

Tim 38:48

Yeah, good guy to learn from.

Tim 38:51

Well, thank you very much for being on Input Doc today, Coreen.

Coreen 38:54

Thank you for having me.

Tim 38:55

I really appreciate your time. Could you tell people where they can learn more about you?

Coreen 39:00

Sure. My Portfolio is outdated as I'm sure most creatives will tell you. If you go there, you can see older projects at coreen.design but I do have my thesis on there and a little bit of fine artwork. You can find the repair cycle on Instagram at repaircycle_seattle. And if you want to learn more about ledger and the exciting things we're doing, you can go to ledger8760.com.

Tim 39:31

Cool. Well, thanks, Coreen.

Coreen 39:32

Thank you so much, Tim. It was a blast.

Tim 39:35

Have a great day.