Sheryl Cababa - Ube

In this episode we speak to Sheryl Cababa, Chief Design Officer at Substantial and author of the new book, Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, about ube, the Filipino flavor that has been appropriated by American dining and all that entails. We get into how responsibility for change gets pushed down to individuals and away from corporations, how identity gets mixed up in the diaspora experience, the difficulty of framing major systemic change in a way that actually gets shit done, and much, much more.

Recommended content from this episode:

A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times - book by Meron Hadero

Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander

Transcript

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(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)

David Dylan Thomas

All right, welcome, once again to ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’. I'm your host, David Dylan Thomas and I am in Seattle for this particular episode, which means I'm speaking to you from the unceded land of the Duwamish, and my very special guest today is Sheryl Cababa. 

Sheryl, tell the good folks what it is that you get up to.

Sheryl Cababa

Yes. So, I am the Chief Design Officer at Substantial, which is a design, research, strategy and build consultancy based here in Seattle, but, you know, we're kind of everywhere. Since the pandemic, we've sort of gone remote. I've also just written a book called Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers, which will be published in 2023.

I don't know what else? I love to cook. I view myself as a design strategist by nature and yeah, that's basically who I am. 

David Dylan Thomas

Excellent. And, and before we get into it, I just want say I've had the privilege to have an advanced copy of this book. When does your book come out?

Sheryl Cababa

I hope I'm not over promising by saying Q1 of 2023. 

David Dylan Thomas

Okay. So, odds are, when this airs, it'll still be a couple months out from coming out, but when it comes out, you absolutely need to get it. It is amazing. So, Sheryl, let me ask you the million-dollar question. What have you been thinking about lately?

Sheryl Cababa

Okay, I might have to do a little bit of explaining but I've been thinking a lot about ube. Do you know what ube is? 

David Dylan Thomas

I don't even know how to spell ube! Please, explain.

Sheryl Cababa

So ube is spelled U B E and it is a purple yam and it's used a lot in Filipino desserts. I've been noticing just living in Seattle or basically if you go to any West coast city, there are a lot of things that have ube as a flavor now, like ice cream places will have it, different dessert places. Sometimes you see it on bubble tea menus. 

My brother was just recently visiting and I don't know why, but so many of the conversations with my brother and my sister and I, because we were all together in person, was just how ube is every everywhere and nothing tastes like it because it's a really subtle flavor. You know, vanilla is kind of subtle? Ube is even more subtle than that. It's a little bit earthy flavor, like earthy tasting, a little bit vanilla tasting, but it's a very specific flavor. It works really well in things like, I don't know, there's a jam called Ube Halaya, ice cream, like stuff like that where you can like really infuse it.

My sister was talking about how there's been a lot of ube stuff lately at Trader Joe's. This will tell you something, that it is very on trend and it's things like ube yogurt pretzels, and there was an ube jam and I think there were like ube cookies or something like that, maybe ube ice cream.

She kept buying these things and would text me like, ‘Oh, I found ube something at Trader Joe's.’ And then she would be like, ‘Doesn't taste like ube.’ Then the jam she tried; she was really excited about it actually. She's like, ‘Oh my gosh, TJ's has an ube jam.’ And then texted me five minutes later and was like, ‘I threw it away. It was so bad. First of all, it didn't even taste like ube, but it also just literally tasted bad.’

I don't know, I feel like ube is a really good example, I also talk a lot with my siblings about cultural appropriation and food and what constitutes appropriation versus appreciation and how it's hard to know where the line is. I feel like ube just kind of falls into that category of, wow. It's like really trendy now – it's purple colored, by the way – so it's kind of a shocking color for food and oftentimes the things that you see that are supposed to be ube flavored are really just like a super deep purple and I'm sure it mostly comes from food coloring. 

I think it's this exotic thing that people are really into right now. So it’s a dessert flavor we grew up with and the only place I have ever had things that actually taste ube is when I visited the Philippines because they know what it tastes like there.

I see this happening a lot with food, just with culture and I don't know, I feel like there's something there and I'm trying to wrap my head around why this issue of ube makes me so mad.

David Dylan Thomas

Well let me ask this, would you feel differently if it actually tasted like ube?

Sheryl Cababa

This is a million-dollar question because yeah, if my sister was buying all those things at TJ and was like, ‘Oh my God. This is really good.’ I feel like I'd still be mad, but would I be more mad or less mad? I think there is a relationship with the fact that it doesn't taste like it. To me, people are making this type of thing, they're selling it, and they don't even know what it's supposed to taste like. Yet they can capitalize on it as an idea. Maybe I would feel better about it if it actually tasted like it.

David Dylan Thomas

I think you point out two layers of appropriation. Let's assume it did taste like ube. If the people profiting from that were not Filipino or if there was a lack of authenticity there in terms of who's profiting from it, I think there would be something to be mad about there. If there's an insult to injury of you clearly don't even care. You're just using the name and slapping purple food coloring on and you still make money off of it, not only are you profiting enough off my culture, but you're cheapening it. You're saying I don't even have to get it right and I can still make money off this thing and you still don't get any money from it.

Sheryl Cababa

I'm actually shaking my head right now because exactly. There's people running around this country who are like, ‘I love ube. I love ube ice cream’, and they've never actually tasted what it's supposed to taste like. It's just, I don't know what it is, maybe a purple vanilla ice cream. And I'm like, ‘Do you though? Do you like it? You don't even know because where are you getting it?’ Sometimes I go down these paths where I'm like, ‘Oh, you like ube ice cream, where have you had it?’  And if they say where they've had it, and I know I've tried it. I'm kind of like my sister. I'll try anything that says it has ube in it. And I don't know if this is just masochism or something, but I keep a log of this, and 90% of the time it'll be from a place where it's just like, no way, that's not ube at all. It's not. 

David Dylan Thomas

Do you think this is what Chinese-Americans went through during the rise of “Chinese food” where it was like, ‘We don't make anything like this. What is this? That isn't even a thing.’ And yet now I fear for you, my fear now is that there will be a thing called ube that does not in fact resemble real ube, but comes to be accepted as ube the same way that Chinese food or even Italian food has become to be accepted as this is what Italian food is. It's sort of like, yeah, but it's not!

Sheryl Cababa

Okay, here's the difference I see, there is a difference. So I feel like Chinese-American food has come up as a thing invented by Chinese-Americans to cater to the white palette.

David Dylan Thomas

Okay, so they at least have ownership of it. 

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah, they own it. And so, you kind of see this movement now. There's this chef called – I think his name is Lucas Sin? Anyway, he's in New York and he has a place where he's making sort of elevated Chinese-American food because it's like now we're going to take this back and make it for ourselves because the flavors actually are pretty good. It is a lot of fried crunchy things, it tastes kind of sweet, but it was born of necessity, like we have to do this in order to survive as a business because we can't cater to the people who we'd want to cook for.

I think that’s slightly different to me than the whole ube issue because I do think there's this exoticization – is that even a word? Exoticization that exists with ube that has to do with how trendy exotic foods are now. I think there is a lack of care in adopting it because I've seen a lot of things like ube cookies where it's a shortbread cookie or something, and it's purple. So, it's meant to taste like ube, but no, ube is too subtle a flavor for that. You cannot put it in a baked good and expect it to survive the oven. It’s just not going to do it. It's not chocolate or something that's really strong. But I do think there is something about capitalizing on that idea that, oh, this is kind of edgy, this is kind of new. We can still put it next to our normal chocolate ice cream and normal vanilla ice cream, but someone who's feeling adventurous is going to try that one.

David Dylan Thomas

So, do you think there's like a cultural tourism that kind of goes with that? 

Sheryl Cababa

Oh yeah, totally. Because it's weird, it sounds exotic, it looks exotic. It's spelled U B E and, who knows, you don’t know how to pronounce it, so there's a certain level of pride for people who are non-Filipino who know how to pronounce ube. They’re like, ‘I love ube stuff’ or find out that I'm Filipino. 

David Dylan Thomas

Does it come out then? Like, ‘Oh, you're Filipino. Oh my God. I love ube!’

Sheryl Cababa

Sometimes that happens and I'm just like, oh no! You have to make a choice, as the type of person who has opinions about this type of thing, you have to make a choice about whether you are going to start an argument or something or not, right. So, a lot of times I'll just let it slide because is it worth it? 

David Dylan Thomas

And there's also sort of this need to represent and even for your sake, you know, white person who has it wrong about ube, I want you to know what real ube is. It would be wonderful if you experienced this thing properly and by not saying anything, I'm letting the myth continue. It's just sort of like, ‘My Filipino friend said it was fine or didn't say anything, I have to assume that I've got it right.’ But I agree I would never want to die on that hill.

Sheryl Cababa

I think this is the choice a lot of minorities have to make. Do I go in on this right now? Is it worth it? If I’m in a certain kind of mood, I will. But I think there is that question of, I don't know, authenticity.  What constitutes authenticity? I want to say, who am I to say what's authentic in many cases? 

I think there's a division, I'm Filipino-American, oftentimes when I go back to the Philippines, which, I say going back home because that's where my parents are from, but it's not actually home to me because when I get there I couldn't feel more different. I couldn't feel more out of place, even though it's so central to my identity here when I'm in the US or when I'm in Europe or whatever. But there, it does feel like everybody's working really hard to make you feel out of place. Like, ’You're not really Filipino. Where are you from?’ I can literally walk around – and this happens to my siblings too – you walk around there and they won't even speak Tagalog to you. They'll speak English to you because they look at you.

David Dylan Thomas

They can clock you right away.

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah, ‘You’re not from around here!’

David Dylan Thomas

Well, no, I've never been to Ethiopia, my dad's from Ethiopia, but I know if I go to Ethiopia, I'm not going to feel like I’m “coming home”. At an ancestral level, sure. But I know I'm going to feel out of place. My dad's even told me, I don't know what the word is, but there's a word in Amharic that basically means white, but they don't just call white people that, they basically call Americans that.

People have asked me, you know, brown people, black and brown people have asked me, when you travel abroad, how does it feel to be a black person in Germany or some other white country? For the most part, what I've noticed, I have felt more my Americanness than my blackness when I travel. That’s the thing where I feel uncomfortable or I'm standing out or I'm a sore thumb because I'm an American. I feel a little out of place because a lot of these places I go don't really have a ton of black people. That is outstanding, but what's even more, I think, remarked upon or I feel more noticeable is just my Americanness.  

When I was in Berlin, I didn't know how to tip. I did some research to know if I even should tip, but then, little things like they bring me the credit card machine, I didn't see an opportunity to, to leave a tip and I only found out later you're supposed to basically calculate that ahead of time and then just add it.

But again, I feel like the rude American, I know what stereotypes Americanness has, and I feel like it is now my duty as an American to upend those wherever I go. But it makes sense to me that if you came back, that's the thing, it's really easy to tell. 

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah, it's really easy to tell. I just read this book that is amazing. It's a book of short stories called A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times and it's by an Ethiopian-American writer. She universally does such a good job of capturing that idea, her characters are people who are either immigrants or born of immigrants, but live in the States and then in the short stories where they go home to Ethiopia, it is exactly what I'm describing, which is they walk around, they're excited to go home. They're like, ‘Yeah, I'm going to be with my people’, and then get there and they're like, ‘Well, I super do not belong here and everybody reminds me at every turn’, in a way that you feel that on a different level when you're here at home in the States. It is one of those things, you always feel othered in one way or another. 

David Dylan Thomas

Well, that's an interesting phrase too, ‘my people’. Well, who are our people? If it's not the people who live where out ancestry lies, and it's not completely the people who are asking us about ube then, who are our people exactly?

Sheryl Cababa

I do not know. I feel like I connect really well with other Filipino-Americans because of our shared experience, but I would probably say most of them like me, feel a little bit like a diaspora.  We don't have that connection like our parents do, to the home country. My parents just live large when they go back home. They're going for basically for three months at the beginning of next year. I'm going to take my 10-year-old and visit for a couple weeks while they're there. I have to say it's really comfortable traveling with them because they are so into being there and they kind of remind everybody that – maybe this is another issue - but they remind everybody that they're from there but live in the States now.

David Dylan Thomas

Really? Well, how do they feel about that? The people back In the Philippines feel about that? 

Sheryl Cababa

I mean, I think there is some sort of power dynamic with that, that is kind of interesting. Maybe it's changing a little bit more because I think there's more of a growing middle class there and what have you. When people who you know are starting to experience maybe wealth in ways that they don't feel like they need to leave to go make it. They can stay right there and make it.

Also, I think the dynamic is shifting also kind of like generationally. But yeah, I mean I think with their generation, because that was the dynamic with the people who are from their generation, I feel like they really admire them for doing it, maybe they're kind of mad at them for doing it. There's a lot of that complexity. Some have feelings of being left behind, that sort of thing. But yeah, it's really interesting kind of seeing those dynamics at play when you visit there. I’m curious about what it's going to be like, because I haven't been there in a while, since before the pandemic. Usually, we go every couple of years.

David Dylan Thomas

I kind of had a question about that too. As we were talking, I’m kind of reminding myself who was in charge.

Sheryl Cababa

It's Marcos now. 

David Dylan Thomas

Oh, that's right, I forgot.

Sheryl Cababa

Which is, I'm just going to say it's insane, it's bananas. 

David Dylan Thomas

But to that point I think a lot about danger. There was a stereotype in my home country that Africa in general is dangerous. That's sort of a myth that's been perpetrated or a perception that's been perpetrated in general. Then I'll talk to people from Africa and they'll be like, ‘Oh, I feel way safer in Africa than I do in America.’ Then I think of it from the other point of view, and I'm like, well, America under Trump, I can't imagine the rest of the world thought America was a safe place to be.

As someone who's taken space in both places and perhaps seen perspectives, what is that like for you?  Do you feel like we're basically just suspiciously eyeing each other with no actual idea what's going on? Or is it like, no, they're actually both incredibly dangerous?

Sheryl Cababa

The world is dangerous! We're in a pandemic. I don't know. I always find it interesting whenever Americans are kind of like, ‘Oh my God, I could never go to X place. It just seems really dangerous there.’ Then if you look at for example, the equivalent of the state departments’ travel advisory website in other countries, I lived in the Netherlands for a long time and basically during the pandemic, their travel advisory was like, Don't go to the US. It is dangerous.’

David Dylan Thomas

Oh, sure!

Sheryl Cababa

I feel like there's this idea of American, I don't know, there's still this lingering idea for a lot of people of American exceptionalism. ‘Oh, this is the richest place. This is the safest place.’ And I'm kind of like, well, one, there's probably only certain people who feel that in this country. If you're basically a non-white person existing in this country, I mean, Asian hate crime went up something crazy, like 300% or something just in the past couple of years. You don't feel safe here in ways that you are likely to feel safe in places that are generally considered, especially by wealthy north Americans to be unsafe. The Philippines is always on the travel advisory. I've never felt in danger there.  Not once. 

David Dylan Thomas

That's the thing, every time I want to go to Ethiopia, it'll be like, and we have a new Civil war!

Sheryl Cababa

That is actually a genuine thing!

David Dylan Thomas

I've talked to people who've been traveling there during – my dad still travels there and he is like, ‘Yeah, where I go, it's fine’ – and the thing is, as I think about that from the perspective of someone living in America, even as a black person in America, I have to imagine that during times of great stress, people still have to do laundry, people still go out to restaurants and buy food. People still watch Netflix, you know, whatever it is, throughout human history, most of it was spent doing laundry, during the Black Plague, during World War 2. None of those normal human things really stopped except in the most extreme of circumstances. On the one hand, it's really easy to kind of get in that perception of, ‘Oh my God, this guy Duterte just slays drug dealers. It must be this horrible thing.’

But if you're living in a place, you probably still wake up, probably still go to the store, you still buy some food, probably still make dinner. I don't think we understand. I certainly don't understand how to do threat assessment.

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah, so I saw this TikTok a few days ago where it was just like teenagers doing a K-pop dance in the street and in the comment, somebody was like, ‘Where is this?’ And then another person was like, ‘It's in Ukraine.’ And I was like, is this really in Ukraine? It's just in a public square where people were just going shopping and some people were filming the people dancing on their phone. Then another person was, I don't know, just dancing in the background, they put down their shopping bags and were dancing in the background. And I was just like, wow. This just feels like such a cognitive disconnect between what we see in the media. There is literally a war going on and there are cities being bombed and stuff, and there is still this mundane stuff happening. The kids are still using their phone and learning a K-pop dance and filming a TikTok video about it.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, I've always been kind of obsessed by the synchronicity that you have the most extreme things happening at the same time. Someone is being born, someone is dying. Someone is learning a K-pop dance, someone is being tortured. I feel like that has always been true, but I feel like the proximity is getting closer and closer and closer to the point where, I don't know, I mean, we're sitting here in downtown Seattle. I doubt there are very many blocks we'd have to travel before we saw something horrible. Or many blocks we'd have to travel before we saw something way more opulent than what we're experiencing right now. I can't get my head around it. I can't get my head around the multi-finality; this is a wonderful word I learned from Sheryl's book. Or the multiplicity, the multiplicity of human experience all at the same time.  That’s mind boggling to me. 

Sheryl Cababa

I think it's kind of funny, sort of going back to the Philippines, I remember being there, I don't know, it must have been 20 years ago. We were driving past Malacanang Palace. This is where the president of the Philippines – do they still live there? I don't even know if they still live there – but the Marcoses live there. That's where they were walking around. They would crank the air conditioning so they could walk around in their fur coats inside.

David Dylan Thomas

What the fuck?

Sheryl Cababa

That's just like the metaphor for how they operated. But yeah, we were driving past there and literally right across the street are some of the worst slums you will ever see. I remember feeling really shocked by that. I mean, I went to the Philippines quite a bit as a kid, but it was my first time as a young adult and I was like, oh my God, that is not acceptable. Well, that exists in the US.  That is right here. That's right here in our city, people living in tents on the sidewalk and if you Zillow a house two blocks away from there, it's going to literally be a $2 million house. I think we just, I don't know, I think we just get really comfortable with these disparities when they're right in our backyard and don't notice that kind of thing until we go somewhere else and we're unfamiliar with it.

David Dylan Thomas

I am sadly used to passing people on the street who are literally lying down. I don't know if they're alive and just sort of just being like – okay with it – is the wrong word, but willing to act as if I am okay with it. Then when I went to Paris, I saw poverty on a whole other level because it was entire families on the street. I had never seen that before. I think I comforted myself, well, they're an adult, they'll sort it out, where it's like, oh my God, that's a whole family with little kids, or a baby just on the street right across from the fancy cafe and it's just like, holy shit.

All of this makes me think about climate change. I think that the human ability to get used to anything is both its greatest strength and its most terrifying weakness and that as a survival skill, it's amazing and a resilient skill. As a black person living in America, I've said this more than once to my black friends, how are we even still here? After the repeated attempts to wipe us out. It's amazing that we're even still here. But at the same time, that resilience in myself, that resilience can also be turned against people to ignore their suffering, against global problems, to let them get as bad as possible before we do anything about them. It's just this, again, it's that duality of, I can't get my head around how wonderful and terrible the same aspect of humanity can be. 

Sheryl Cababa

I mean it is kind of a tired analogy, but it’s the frog in the lukewarm water or whatever, and then it just  slowly comes to a boil and just kills it. That’s like us, that's like society right now, especially when you're thinking about things like climate change and climate emergency. Climate emergency is like, we're not really treating it like an emergency. I'm sorting my compost and my recycling, and every now and then I have this existential feeling, like why am I doing this when I have a doppelganger somewhere across the country who is not doing this, who's driving a Ford F-150 and is eating nothing but red meat and whatever. This is why the personal responsibility thing is so problematic when it comes to our climate emergency.

I don't know. It truly feels like a tragedy of the commons. Wasn't there a Guardian article where it was like 90% of emissions come from just a hundred companies or something like that? 

David Dylan Thomas

That’s the thing, recycling is the opiate of the masses. It's funny too because it never did occur to me. I talk about it in my book. I talk about these anti-littering campaigns, which were actually wonderful behavioral design examples. But we're also in service of letting corporations off the hook for polluting at a much higher level. Even conversations, I get really conflicted about conversations about, well, if you're a woman, you should speak up at work more. I get that and I get the whole learning the master's rules to stay in the game or whatever, and accumulate power, but at the same time, it skips right over the conversation of, well, why are they ignoring you in the first place? Why is it always the target of oppression's responsibility to do better? I feel like the, the, the climate change person, the world's going to end because you didn't do your recycling situation is a yet another iteration of, ‘Well, don't blame me, I'm a corporation, did you do your recycling though?’

Sheryl Cababa

Right! Yeah, remember when Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean in, this is such a dumpster fire of a book. Just this idea of, its up to you. It’s not up to anyone in the system to create change. You have to be the one to speak up at work, you have to be the one to push. You have to adopt these behaviors that are so toxic in the work environment in order to be able to claw your way up and, basically kind of get yours. It doesn't, I don't know, it feels like it just does so much of perpetuating what makes that kind of culture and environment toxic to begin with and then maybe even makes it worse. It means that people who shouldn't be adopting those behaviors are adopting them, so it just in many ways reinforces it, confirms it in ways that we shouldn't.

David Dylan Thomas

I like to use the Heist analogy. You want to learn the rules of the game, not because you want to get good at the game, but because you want to steal the casino. I need to understand where the shift changes are. I feel like it's casing a joint, that level of, okay, let's understand the white man's game and capitalism's inner workings because we're casing the joint because we're actually trying to figure out how to subvert the system.

I don't remember if we talked about this earlier or not, but one of the things I've noticed is that systems are very good at hiding themselves. So that aspect of personal responsibility in general as a weapon, wielded as a weapon against targets of oppression, is a blinding technique. It's an obfuscation technique to say, ‘Pay no attention to the system behind the curtain. The world moves based on your actions and if you're unhappy, it's your fault, or if the world is unhappy, it's your fault. You are the master and commander.’

But I'm curious, is that something – as you've studied systems – you've noticed as a quality of a system is self-obfuscation?

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s really easy – and the US has a really extreme form of individualism, this extreme individualism, that puts the onus of basically everything that happens to you is connected to your own choices and the things that you do as an individual. This is why we fared so badly, I mean, this is one reason we fared so badly during the pandemic, is because we don't have a very good sense of what we need to do collectively. I think systems are, would I say they're somehow intentionally invisible? I think that’s like kind of a good question. I mean, one of the things that I write about that got me interested in systems thinking to begin with is there are these little indicators all surrounding us that are just, is this the top of an iceberg?  You can see something and that's an indication of a vast system beneath it.

One of the things I wrote about was where trees are located in cities. It's literally something you can see in the street.  You can see how some neighborhoods are leafy and green and cooler in the summer and other neighborhoods are concrete and there's no greenery whatsoever. Those neighborhoods can actually be 15, 20, maybe even 25 or 30 degrees hotter. That has to do, I think it's like maybe we need to be better about training ourselves to try to not just see what's in front of us on the surface level, but also to kind of think about why is that? Why does the Queen Anne neighborhood in Seattle have so many trees? You look at an area like Beacon Hill, which was historically redlined, it doesn't have as many old growth trees. I think that helps us to kind of uncover maybe what's going on that's surrounding us and hopefully encourage people to challenge that about why are things that way.

I'm trying to think of some other examples of that, but we're surrounded, oh, one example that I've been thinking about a lot actually has been in the Netherlands. I didn't realize this until I think I saw a YouTube video about this. But I lived there for 10 years and never connected that the sidewalks are actually raised. So, when a car has to kind of drive over a sidewalk, it's almost a speed bump. They have to go up over it and then go back down. Every time. These are called continuous sidewalks, and what it does is it slows traffic and also sends the signal that pedestrians are important and actually have priority.

David Dylan Thomas

Oh, wow. 

Sheryl Cababa

It's an actual infrastructure version of prioritizing pedestrians. Bike lanes are the same way. They're in many cases elevated. If you see how sidewalks are designed in a city like Seattle, you have to step down from the curb, sometimes there's not even a curb cut. So, God help you if you're in a wheelchair and then you have to cross six lanes of traffic and the thing is turning red before you're even halfway across. What is being prioritized here? It's not me as a pedestrian. I think there's so many examples of that that just surround us. And maybe it's just up to us, the first step is awareness and then you can sort of exert change after that. But I think oftentimes, we don't even know. I you haven't been to other places, if you haven't been to Amsterdam and seen what it's like to not be in a car-centric place, it's hard to imagine alternatives. It's invisible to you then. You're just like, well of course you drive everywhere in American cities.

David Dylan Thomas

We’ve had this discussion before. Actually, before I get into this, I want to talk about imagination, if you don't mind. One of the great things in your book is kind of an expansion of typical design thinking into systems thinking that involves adding a couple other steps. If you could just briefly kind of give us the big picture of what you need to do to enhance limited design thinking, to really think about these bigger issues, you know the method I’m talking about?

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah, so the human-centered design processor, design thinking process typically is represented in the five steps, which is empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. This is oftentimes presented as a circular process. You keep doing this, this iterative design. It emphasizes kind of understanding the context of an individual before they use whatever product service solution that you're designing. 

This is something that has been probably taught in design education for 20 years now at least, if not longer, in some format. What I try to do to kind of expand what that looks like is, I think it's a pretty powerful process for once you know what you want to design, you have a very specific thing in mind. Oftentimes it's used to maybe problem solve for what we call wicked problems, hugely complex spaces, things like homelessness, racism, police brutality.

I can't remember who it was, but I remember seeing on Twitter somebody saying, ‘If I see a sticky note that fucking says, how might we end racism? That's the end of design thinking. That needs to be the end.’ 

So, I think what we need to do is better understand the context in which possible ideas for making change will sit. So, what that means is adding these steps kind of before and after the design process, and I called them expand, so expand your definition of what the problem space is and understand the system within it. Imagine the multi-finality, the many ways that collectively we can exert change. Because that's the other thing too, is no designer has the power to end racism.

You need to have so many different stakeholders involved, including – and I think you were talking about this when I last spoke to you – about communities, etc. that are already doing the work and connecting with them and understanding how to better elevate their efforts etc.

Then you can move into the design process for a lot of things. That could be like 10 or 12, or whatever, just multiple design processes for different initiatives, interventions, what have you. And then there's a last step after thinking about all these different ways of problem solving, that is evaluate. So, evaluate what makes a difference. Also evaluate if any of these are causing harm. Thinking about unintended consequences of the various interventions that you engage in and then of course that process in and of itself is circular. You should always be kind of expanding what your notion of the system is, then imagining, then going through design thinking and then evaluating. 

David Dylan Thomas

Thank you for that, and the piece of that referencing what we were talking about earlier is the value of going to other places so you can imagine a city where bikes are more important than cars. I can kind of think about that, but having been to Amsterdam I can tell you what it looks like or I can tell you a version of what that looks like. I can picture it in my head very clearly. If you were to tell me, okay, I want to turn Seattle into a city that values bikes over cars, I couldn't tell you if we can do it, I can't tell you guaranteed this is how to do it, but I can certainly say, okay, I can start to draw lines and say, okay, here's where we're trying to get to, or here's the sorts of things that we'll probably have to change. Way easier than if it's just, I don't know, bigger bikes?

You’re reacting to nothing and designers hate reacting to nothing. They hate being told what to do, but they also hate being just like, ‘all right, blue sky, how do we end racism?’ That's not helpful either. But the place I want to apply it, the place I personally have been struggling to apply it is prison abolition or police abolition. Sort of saying, what does it look like to live in a world without police, without prisons? 

Recently, AOC actually gave a speech where she sort of said what we need to do really, or where we've been falling short in that discussion is we've sort of missed the forest for the trees and said, the question you need to ask is how do we get to a world that doesn't need prisons? Which is a different question and it makes it way easier to answer that. I almost wish we had a time machine, not so we can go back and change things, but so that we can go back and observe things because there were cultures, lots of them that did not have police, did not have prisons, and they were fine. Or at least they were no worse than what we’ve got, and probably a lot better.

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah, exactly. It is part of the framing issue. Even if I believe in like defund the police, I'm kind of like, but I think we need to articulate what does that look like? What is needed? What needs to be funded? It does have that aspect of it feels missing the forest for the trees. We're focused on this one spot that's kind of a symptom and there's a lot of things that need to happen before and after that in order for it to work and for it to actually have an impact and for us to be able to exert the change that we want. 

David Dylan Thomas

Didn’t Seattle actually do some version of that at one point and it was sort of like, yeah, we went a little too far!

Sheryl Cababa

I actually don't know. I mean, I know we lost a lot of the police force in Seattle and it's kind of been turmoil, we have a new mayor.  There have been a lot of changes. I can't say I think anything is necessarily better – I don't know if it's worse. I mean I think it's like there, there is not any sort of unified strategy or anything that I'm aware of that is, I don't know, also long-term oriented.

Here’s something kind of interesting, right?  Seattle just hired a director of transportation and he's coming from LA which when I heard that I was like, no! What? He knows what LA is like, right?

He said he's moving here, I guess it remains to be seen whether he actually does this, he's moving here and he's not going to buy or bring a car. 

David Dylan Thomas

Oh!

Sheryl Cababa

So he's going try to get around by bike, by public transportation. And I'm like, yes, you need somebody who's going to walk the walk because it's hard to know otherwise. It is really freaking hard to get around this town if you absolutely do not have a car. It shouldn't be and yet it is. And the bike infrastructure is relatively terrible. I mean, you can bike around here, but it does not feel safe. It doesn't feel safe for me and my kids. 

Then again, we calibrate by having lived in Holland where they were biking by themselves to places when they were six years old. So that's a completely opposite end of the spectrum. But Seattle is generally known as a place that's pretty positive for cyclists etc.

So, I think there's that aspect of, I don't know, this is why I kind of have a little bit of, I try to focus a lot on who you're involving in the design process. As I was thinking about and writing my book, I think systems thinking can be very abstract exercise and it can just sort of, I don't know, reinforce existing powers.

What I'd hope is we can continue to kind of reinvent the design process to involve and empower more lived experts to kind of be within the process so we can kind of be better about distributing power to people who are going to be most affected by changes.

David Dylan Thomas

I mean you're talking about participatory design, right?  

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah. 

David Dylan Thomas

So what does participatory system design look like?

Sheryl Cababa

It’s a good question because I feel like any of these practices are evolving, of course. But I think there's a lot of good of sort of foundational activities within design thinking that you can use.  If you're doing co-design and you're using workshop formats and things like that, but to actually engage in co-design means you have to fundamentally shift your mindset away from ‘I'm extracting information from these people in this room, in this workshop, and then I’m going off on my little design process by myself or with my team of two other designers and we're going to design solutions based on what they've said to us or what they've shared with us or told us about their context.’ I don't know how much that, I mean, that doesn't feel to me like it disrupts power enough to actually constitute change. Especially when you're working in spaces where you're interested in increasing equity. Granted, there's a lot of designers who work in spaces that whatever organization they're working for is not interested at all.

David Dylan Thomas

Might be actively against it!

Sheryl Cababa

Might be actively against it. I'm looking at you some big technology companies that extract all our information. I think there's still an opportunity, maybe there's an opportunity even in those environments to kind of subvert because I think maybe you have the resources to be able to kind of subvert some of what your organization's focused on. It just depends. But I think in terms of participatory design, we basically in my teams, we're trying to think of the live experts that we engage as an advisory group. So, trying to shift the power in that way.  This is a group that basically kind of evaluates and approves what we are thinking about doing and is actually engaged in the process of creating it.

It makes the process go slower. It's potentially more expensive and basically as a consultant, I need to have clients who will agree go through this and actually prioritize it as well, which I'm pretty lucky to have that. So, it's really great. We do a lot of work in education. We have actual students who are engaged in those processes with us and who actually kind of sign off on the work that we're doing. We find ways to facilitate the co-design of the work we're doing. So, if we're creating a toolkit or something like that, they're actively part of making that toolkit with us.

So, we're trying to find ways, and I know one of the issues that just seems kind of impractical for organizations who are moving really, really fast and they’re like, ‘Just get feedback, just usability test this.’ But I don't know, I kind of think as designers we should engage in persuasive language, right?

You should sell why this is important and why it should take longer or why it should be more expensive. And just kind of see how far you can get doing that. That's how you can kind of start evolving your practice, I think.

David Dylan Thomas

I mean, I'll self-promote for a second here. The whole third chapter of my book is basically how to jedi mind trick your boss into doing the right thing.

Sheryl Cababa

I love that.

David Dylan Thomas

I love hearing activists talk about trickster god energy. I keep hearing genuine frustration from people I care deeply about who are deeply trying to work towards systemic change and the struggle between, do I try to get into the system and change it from the inside or this or that or the other? And I feel, again, going back to the heist metaphor, there's a real trickster god energy to if you're not working with an organization that wants to change, you trick it into change. That is as ethical as anything they're doing. Probably far more ethical and I think a lot about system transformation. 

Have you studied or have you observed what the dynamics are when systems do change? Because I think we're fooling ourselves if we think, okay, capitalism, patriarchy and racism are this intricate dance of systems that have existed since the dawn of time and are immutable and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, all of those evolved into what they are now and all those things, like all systems, will eventually go away and be replaced by something else. And do you know the case studies or have you seen like, okay, I can point to that point in history where this system changed into that and here are some of the factors that were involved.

Sheryl Cababa

Yeah, I mean, I think that's something I would have to sort of think about where having lived in the – I'm going to go back to transportation again – so in the early 1970s in Amsterdam, essentially a lot of kids were being killed by cars. It was a bad scene, very much how it is in the US today. Pedestrian death on the roads is just bananas. The percentages are really high. But it was in the late sixties, early seventies that people in Amsterdam were just like, enough, or maybe just in the Netherlands in general, they're like, we've had enough of this. And they were like, the government's actually planning to build I think it was a highway that just cut through the middle of Amsterdam and there were such massive protests that they ended up not doing it. They started not preventing that type of development, but removing development that had actually happened already.

David Dylan Thomas

Oh wow!

Sheryl Cababa

Removing roads and highways that maybe have existed. I don't know enough about this to understand how they actually managed to make it happen, but there was a lot of collective action around it and I think that is really where some of that the most radical change can happen.

I like what you were saying about trickster energy, because I was just listening to that podcast, Invisibilia, and they were talking about power. They had this guy on there who, he’s kind of, I don't know if it was just in his organization or something, but he's kind of a union guy and he was trying to form a union in this organization he was working in. He would have his colleagues engage in just these weird little, it almost feels like performance art in way. He was telling them like, ‘Everybody bring in those little ketchup bottles and put them all over the corporate office so that the manager starts saying, ‘What’s up with all these ketchup bottles?’’

Then everyone who was involved in this, they would all have the same response, which was, well, it's because we need to catch up in this company with wages. So you would have them engage in these things that get management's attention and then he would do the same with them in order to help them feel their power a little bit more.

So, he would dress up a manager and come to one of their meetings where maybe the people didn't know him or whatever. Maybe this is a big enough company, but they didn't know him and he would just wear a button-down shirt and a cheap watch that maybe looks expensive, a certain type of glasses, and then come to this meeting and just be telling them everything that's wrong that they're doing and saying like, ‘What are your names?’ and stuff like that. Then he would reveal to them, ‘Oh, by the way, I'm on your side, I'm not actually a manager of this company. I'm not a director,’ or whatever he introduced himself as. Everybody would be like, ‘Oh my God, I was so worried!’ He's done this multiple times and one person actually started crying out of relief. 

David Dylan Thomas

Oh my gosh!

Sheryl Cababa

What was funny though is after that they started kind of feeling themselves when it came to power and being able to be like, through that kind of role play and being able to be like, now I know how to respond to somebody like that who's challenging us in that way. But then also kind of like, I don't know, doing it with humor and what have you. He felt that was really an empowering exercise. So I love that idea of change through a trickster ethos.

David Dylan Thomas

Well, it's more than that though. The methods are trickster methods, but the outcome, the intent is this unification, give someone a picture of the awareness of their power when they do the same thing at the same time. Which is an extremely powerful thing, which once you see it, you can't unsee. That's a really interesting, and I suspect very old kind of guerrilla tactic, where it's like, we don't have the weapons, we don't have the power, but we have the numbers. I mean, that's as old as unions. That's as old as indigenous resistance.  I think that's a great note to end on to give people hope that yes, use your tricks and energy to unionize.

Sheryl Cababa

Collective action, everyone!

David Dylan Thomas

Sheryl, thank you so much. When your book comes out, folks, absolutely get it. It's amazing. 

And for the Cognitive…I always do this…for the Cognitive Bias podcast, I haven't done that podcast in over a year, Sheryl, over a year! But I literally said those words at least a hundred times because that's how many episodes there are. So, I'm going to give myself a pass, but Sheryl, thank you!

And, for ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’ – because that’s what this podcast is called, I am David Dylan Thomas. We’ll see you again.