Insights: BinBin Pearce

At the end of October 2015, we led a workshop about our current project Syns, on the consequences of designing new food systems with synthetic biology. We also took the opportunity to talk with BinBin Pearce after her talk, loaded with questions about teaching critical thinking and transdisciplinarity.

Hi BinBin, please can you introduce yourself and your background?

My name is BinBin Pearce and I am currently a post-doc within the department of Environmental System Sciences at the ETH Zurich. I have a PhD from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, my research topic was in industrial ecology. Prior to my thesis, I obtained Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in environmental engineering. I became interested in transdisciplinarity when I discovered, while performing field work for my PhD thesis, the necessity of working with across multiple disciplines and also together with practitioners in society. The research was about understanding the urban phosphorus cycle in Singapore, I worked with government agencies and NGOs to develop scenarios for sustainable organic waste management.

At Lift Basel 15, you are conducting a workshop about future of food. What is your interest in extrapolation of future perspectives?
Quite a few years ago, I worked on a project that used energy models to predict the influence of natural gas prices and other energy policies in China on greenhouse gas emissions. Through that project, I realized the limitations of using models to predict the future. Models are really valuable to understand how systems work and to check whether our understanding of the current system is reliable, but they are not actually useful in predicting the future. These deterministic models also assume that the future is already defined by a fixed set of factors and that is exactly why they are never right. Personally, I think it is a much more fruitful to create visions of the future we want to live in. This is perhaps best accomplished with people who will be a part of the particular future and then work together towards those visions. We can then use the models as a way to create common ground for understanding reality, but then rely on our own values and beliefs as the guide for the future, rather than a black box of numbers, which is often what deterministic models become.

How do you connect sustainability and food in your work?

The reason I link food to sustainability started with the problem we gave students at the ETH week: “How would you encourage a more sustainable food system to be created?”. We picked this question since the food system is linked to so many of our activities. It especially relates to how we do agriculture, which has a huge impact on how we use resources, be it water, fertilizers or petroleum. The questions of food systems are also connected to waste management problems. In Switzerland and many other developed countries, food waste corresponds to about a third of our total amount of municipal waste generation. This means that by managing food waste, we are also addressing the problem of waste in general. Food as a topic almost touches on all the aspects of our lives and inseparable from the issue of achieving any sort of “sustainability”, no matter how it is defined.

Aside from sustainability, according to you, what are the systemic challenges faced by food in a near-future?

The crisis we are facing right now is our own attitude towards food. I think the main challenge is to understand what our own relationship with food is. This is especially important because the way that food is being grown and manufactured by industry and agriculture is rapidly changing . Without self-awareness of what is right for each of us to eat, we are susceptible to external messages from these industries. I think this is where the crisis stands since in the end nobody is actually looking at you and your relation with food. The only ones doing so are yourself and your family, perhaps your friends maybe. If everyone became aware, clear and were able to dominate their delusions about what their relationship with food is that would be the first step to achieve sustainability.
This is where stands my conflict with my area of study. As scientists, we look at what is wrong with food at a systemic level and how we can fix it. To me, this is not the question. All the problems you see out there start with the individual. My interest, supported with design thinking and science method thinking, is on how we bridge the individual perception with systemic action.
To solve this problem, first we have to approach the dilemma of discomfort. When people say “we need to be sustainable”, it is actually conflicting with what they are, with how they are living and with a certain amount of uncertainty about how their living is right. I think sustainability has to be an outcome of self-knowledge rather the other way around.

Are you trying to involve community in your work? How does it influence your work?

At the Transdisciplinarity Lab (TdLab), where I work, one of our key ideas is the notion of co-production of knowledge.
Often, when scientists approach communities and societies to do research, they use communities as samples for surveys, or they see a community as an audience to whom they report their findings to.
However, what we are interested in is the coproduction of knowledge, which means that we work intensely with the community in order to learn what they know. There are many things that local people know about that scientists are not aware of. This is essential for finding out how to frame research questions in a way that would be relevant for the public. At TdLab, we also implement design thinking to consider the societal relevance of research questions. You want to create a level of empathy before projecting your own ideas about what the problem is. This has practical implications too since we would like the community uses the solution we came up with. This is important because unless the problem itself is relevant, the solution to the problem will not be implemented within a community. And if the goal of research is to help solve societal problems, we can save a lot of resources if we can make sure that we start with a relevant problem.

Earlier, you were speaking about design thinking and scientific method, which kind of differences or similarities do you see between these two disciplines?
In one way,I see design thinking and the traditional scientific approach operating at difference scales. Design thinking values the personal perspective and the individual’s needs, whereas science approach is interested in finding generalizations of the individual experience so that we are able to find laws and rules that apply to many different systems would get rid of this individual scale. In this way, you can see what the different schools of thoughts are. From a scientific point of view, you start with this understanding or belief that things can be objective and then you can find truth from objectivity. From a design perspective, you state that individuals experience reality in different ways and this is only what matters. You can find this difference across academia, between humanities and sciences and even between skepticism and Descartes. This tension exists in the world because our society has become so imbued with the objectivity from scientific and technological ways of thinking that it is hard to acknowledge there could be other ways that could work just as well. I think it is a valuable pursuit to explore ways of thinking about reality which is also beyond what can be empirically measured.

In your projects, we see a very problem solving approach, but you are also promoting critical thinking. How do you merge the best of the two approaches?

It depends on how you define critical thinking as I don’t think everybody defines it in the same way. For me critical thinking is the ability to ask the right questions, to never assume your answers are correct and to keep being skeptical about the information you are given.
It links back to a particular way of teaching, the Socratic method of teaching. Socrates never taught anything to anyone, he only made people being mad at him by keeping to ask annoying questions to people. Through these questions, he showed people what they, in fact, knew, and what they didn’t know.
I think design thinking could be another way of practicing this fundamental Socratic method because you can teach it in so many different ways.
You can do it as a lecture, having slides about what is empathy, what is ideation, what is brainstorming and finally giving exercises about these notions. I think we should rather use design thinking as a good opportunity to link innovation to critical thinking. Good design thinking is critical thinking.

During the ETH week, we tried to incorporate the Socratic tradition by limiting the expert inputs that were given to the students. When inputs were given, they were given in forms of questions and feedback, rather than formal inputs. The focus was a lot more on students producing things rather than spending time in lectures. Secondly, we spent a lot of time training tutors, who were the PhD students that accompanied each of the groups. The role of the tutor was not to give any information or to intrude in the process. Their job was to act as a mirror for the team. At the end of the day, there were debriefings with each team where tutors said what they observed from the group dynamic, telling from an objective point of view what went well and what didn’t. Students had then the evening to discuss what they could change or not. All the teams reacted well to this way of evolving. Suddenly, they changed their dynamic of group according to the shared observations. This is critical thinking as well: it is not about telling to the students how they should change, but giving them the opportunity to reflect on their actions.

We took the premise of design thinking, which is you have to complete all these steps to achieve innovation, but we implemented them in a way we never told the students what they should precisely do. Maybe, at some point, they got a sense of how we would like them to behave. We only laid down rules for culture such as critique constructively, respect one another or failure is good. We used these guidelines from design thinking to motivate but never to constrain. As they have a complete freedom on the schedule, we just gave them a workbook with the rough times of the project, without saying “ten minutes up, next!”.
This freedom was actually the very scary part of the whole week as a lot of money was invested and we were giving it over to the students. Even if there were debates among the group, we all agreed it was a chance to take to try something different.

It is a bit of a provocation, if we look at design thinking, there are a lot of questions about metrics and evaluation, and in scientific methods a lot about testing and assessing. Should critical thinking be assessed or evaluated?
You are hitting the point on which we are working on right now! We realized critical thinking will never be taught, in the way we think it should be taught, without a way to assess whether a student has achieved critical thinking or not. The whole university system is based on assessments, so if we have to test critical thinking, we have to envisage new methods. At the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH, we are now revamping a yearlong course to environmental sciences in order to implement critical thinking and design thinking methods. In order to assess performance in the course, we will be experimenting with new evaluation methods. For example, instead of having them to write down their answers to multiple-choice questions, we have them to produce a role-play. Here, we have a set of tutors playing certain roles, putting students in a specific situation and having them evaluating how they react to the different attitudes and issues. We are assessing them, on a scale, on how they take into account different points of view when formulating their answer.

Taking a step backward, however, it is important to first define the measurable objectives for students. That is to say, what do we want students to learn and why do we want them to learn this? For this, we are starting with the Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, a taxonomy that has been developed half a century ago. We are looking at it very carefully as it has a very interesting approach in defining the steps of the depth of perception. For example, the first step is just about knowing there are different steps of perception. Second step is to evaluate what these different ways of perception are. Third is to internalize these values. Fourth is to develop a new set of values. Then, if we could develop a set of objectives linked to these deepening steps of perception, this is the start of teaching critical thinking.

You have an international background, how does it reflect in your practice? Do you draw on multiculturalism to encourage transdisciplinarity?
I was born in China and at the age of five my family moved to the US, in Boston. I spent most of my childhood in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Later, I did my PhD at Yale University with field work in Singapore and I’m now working in Switzerland.
As we can never really be far away from who we are as people, I definitely think I always tried to juggle with perspectives and cultures. It has always appealed to me to do transdisciplinary work because this is how I have lived my life, crossing boundaries. It is maybe because I grew up with a father who was an academic, but also a business person that I’ve always understood the importance of being able to see things from multiple perspectives. I’ve also always thought that the most creative and interesting products come out of the act of crossing boundaries, be those boundaries be between disciplines or professions. For me being transdisciplinary just means looking at the big picture and knowing the implications of your work in the broader societal context. Anybody who is able to take themselves out of their shoes and to see how what they are doing is affecting other people, it is already a type of transdisciplinary thinking.
All good scientists are able to write a great news story because they can tell us why what they do is important. This is the “so what” of it. If you are able to tell the “so what” of what you do, then you are ready for interdisciplinarity as you will always be able to make connections with what other people do and think.

What are your next steps or projects?

I wish I knew, but I can tell you my general direction.
For the next two years, I will be working on revamping the curriculum of bachelor’s and master’s program at the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH. I am also interested in publishing papers on this idea of integrating design thinking and the systems science perspective. Also, I am always interested in cities, so I am thinking on how we can apply our research in an urban setting. I keep working with tutors from the ETH week, as we now have this sort of collective teaching others how to teach. We want to start mobile workshops around the world to test our own approach of teaching and not stopping with design thinking and scientific thinking. We want to use this program as an incubator to try teaching ideas we can later bring back to the university.

I know that teaching is my passion and exploring new ways of teaching well motivates me. In Switzerland, there is a lot of potential in experimenting with new teaching methods as the basic questions of governance and institutions are already solved. Switzerland is the ideal field to test new ideas. If you think about Maslow’s pyramid, a lot of people have their needs covered here, so they have even more possibilities to think about what is the meaning of life, what they are doing and what it means for others. Being freed from basic needs, there is just more capacity to answer these questions.