EP 106: Designing Health Across Scales | Joanne Cheung
Health is not a luxury product. But why have our systems commodified health? How might we design health into our everyday lives?
Joanne Cheung is an artist and designer. She formerly served as a Director of Systems Change at the global design firm IDEO. In her ongoing effort to amplify the public impact of research and policy through design, she spearheaded creative collaborations with institutions including the Icelandic Glaciological Society, Harvard Earth and Planetary Sciences Visualization Lab, Harvard Office of Sustainability, Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and Dartmouth Life Sciences Center. She has been a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the American Association of University Women, an Artist-in-Residence at the Icelandic Association of Visual Artists, and a speaker at Duke Center on Law & Technology and the National Academy of Sciences, and her work has been featured in Wallpaper, Wired, Azure Magazine, Fast Company, and the New York Times. She lectures at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
Episode mentions and links:
IDEO: First Mile Health via Building H
Upstreaming Health, a d.school class by Joanne Cheung, Stephen Downs, and Sara Singer
Joanne would take you to a Restaurant Thai Temple Backyard Brunch at: Wat Mongkolratanaram
Follow Joanne: Twitter
Episode Reflection
Why do we “deliver” health care? Something that stood out to me in the conversation this week with Joanne was challenging the concept of “delivering health care.” Immediately my mind jumped to the parallels of getting takeout food delivered for dinner. The chances are that if I order delivery, for better or worse, I’m gonna get something that is really hard to make on my own and not sized correctly for me. Also, I’ll care A LOT less about what it takes to make because someone is just going to magically bring it to me. Of course, there is a 100% chance I’ll order a deep-fried appetizer that I didn’t need and some kind of carb-heavy main dish that, at the moment, I just couldn’t live without. On the plus side though, there was no way I was ever going to make my own Samosa, Garlic Naan, and Chicken Tikka Masala (with extra Mango Chutney) Mmmmm. Wait, what was I talking about? Oh right! HEALTH CARE delivery. Actually, the current system of health care delivery sounds exactly like getting dinner delivered! The health care we get is rarely perfectly sized (or designed) for what we actually need and is almost always unfamiliar or impossible to decipher on your own. Also, it’s sorta just handed to you in a box. As a patient, you aren’t really engaged in its creation. As Joanne mentioned, we employ a “one-size-fits-all” system that doesn't really look at people as individuals, but instead as commoditized units. Sometimes we end up with more than we need, sometimes less. But that is what you get with a system built around the delivery of a pre-packaged unit! And while there is so much proven value in focusing on the elements of our health that we can control before we get sick, you know, the boring homemade dinner kind of stuff. So much money is instead poured into the complex and exotic solutions required to fix the downstream effects of an unhealthy and unjust system. What if healthcare “delivery” was more like a homemade family dinner, where everyone brings a little something and creates something beautiful, familiar, and nourishing? I know, I’m beating the analogy to death at this point, but let's be honest, food is just more relatable! So here’s my question for you, what would your perfectly sized, familiar, warm, and comforting version of healthcare be?
Written by Rob Pugliese
-
Bon Ku: Health is not a luxury product, but why have our systems commodified health? And how might we design health into our everyday lives? I'm Bon Ku the host of Design Lab, a podcast that explores the intersection of design and health. Our guest is Joanne Cheung she is an artist and designer. She formerly served as the Director of Systems Change at the global design firm, IDEO and her ongoing effort to amplify the public impact of research policy through design. She spearheaded creative collaborations with institutions, such as Harvard Earth and Planetary Sciences at Visualization Lab and the Dartmouth Life Sciences Center.
She has been a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the American Association of university Women. And artist in residence at the Icelandic Association of Visual Arts. Joanne's work has been featured in Wallpaper, Wired, Azur Magazine, Fast Company, and the New York Times. She lectures at the d.School at Stanford University and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
If you haven't done so already visit our website at designlabpod.com. There, you can find a show notes from each episode. Learn more about the guests and get links to related content from each episode. And you'll find a link to subscribe to our VIP newsletter. So you don't have to go to our website, but instead get an email from our producer, Rob Pugliese with show notes and links right in your email inbox, whenever a new episode drops.
Thanks for giving us a five-star rating, both on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We appreciate your support. Uh, if you haven't done so please go to Spotify or Apple Podcasts, give us five stars. Even better, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. This really helps others find out about the show.
Now here's my conversation with Joanne Chung. Joanne Chung, welcome to Design Lab. I'm so excited to have you on the show.
Joanne Cheung: Yeah. Delighted to be.
Bon Ku: So you describe yourself as both an artist and a designer, but you're also interested in health.
So I'm curious to know what led you to study design, and how did you, as a designer artist, get interested in the field of health?
Joanne Cheung: Yeah. So, I was born in China. My parents, my grandparents, basically, as far as I think the family history goes, have all been, workers in health, be it physicians or nurses and whatnot. So, and of course this is what China in the early eighties, and so like. , all of the housing is related to where your family works.
So I basically lived and grew up in a hospital like, and so, you know, I, I just remember, growing up, if my mom had a night shift, she would send me off to another nurse and I just started calling everyone mom. So it was that kind of thing where healthcare was all around me growing up. and I think one of my favorite games that I played, which I made up when I was a child, was, to give people x-rays. My grandma's a radiologist. So the way I did that was I would like, like whenever we had a guest, I would ask them for their arm and I would draw with a marker, like a broken bone on their arm and I would take a wet paper towel and like put it on their arm and have an imprint
And so
Bon Ku: Oh, I love
Joanne Cheung: I called in, giving them an x-ray. Any case.
Bon Ku: Whoa, so you really come from a long lineage of position to healthcare workers. Your grandma was a radiologist, you said.
Joanne Cheung: Yeah, my grandmother, I think like, I mean, and then this is, I'm pretty sure her parents were, practitioners of Chinese medicine. So she's, she trained in western medicine, but it's health, you know, all of the instruments. Everything was very familiar to me cuz it was kind of the context for where I grew up.
That being said, the only person in my family who decided not to go to med school, I went to art school which was like a bit of a controversy I think,
Bon Ku: Oh, I, I can imagine that
Joanne Cheung: like, how can they, you know, and I'm a single child, so like how could you like not do the thing that we've always done? And I mean, at the time I think it was hard for me to even to explain, but it just didn't feel right. and I think over the years I've found that increasingly I've come full circle to. Seeing that art and creativity are as related to why, what drives people to medicine. So you know, the about caring for people, caring for communities, but also for me, doing things in a creative way.
And I think increasingly the realization that a lot of the challenges, Are in the world that need to be healed are things that are at a systems level that it's really hard to do, if you're just one nurse or one doctor. So I kind of increasingly saw that in my own family and the limitations of their own practice.
and so this is, I guess why , I went the other way, but I think still a lot of my work is very much related to health. It's just that I'm coming at it from another angle.
Bon Ku: that's so fascinating. I'm coming at it from a totally 180 degrees where I went, I was like, my parents are Korean and I had to become a physician. Otherwise they would've disowned me. And I came into art and creativity after I was a practicing physician and then seeing, oh, there, there is that connection there between like health, and creativity.
And I'm curious to know from your lens, how do you see that connection? Because it's not obvious to a lot of people.
Joanne Cheung: I think the connection is like caring about people, but then understanding that, you can't just look at people as individuals. You have to look them, look at them in the context of their culture, their communities, larger systems in society. And then, you know, very quickly you get up to the planetary level and talk about things like climate change.
So I think, you know, looking at my own family, everybody specialized basically in a different body part, right? , like my grandmother's a radiologist and my other grandmother's in reproductive health. So they basically looked at just different parts of the human body, not even maybe at the person as a whole.
And I think Like, we want that kind of, expertise and attention, but also increasingly, it's impossible to try to understand or care for like a small part of a human body without also caring about things at, bigger and bigger scales. And so I think the practice of. Creative work is to try to connect things across these different scales so that your actions are helping, you know, are laddering up to impact, at a systems level.
But of course you can't only act on the systems level. You can, you have to also come back down to the ground. So I think this constant changing of scales is something that, you know, like the famous Eames Powers of 10 is something that's, I think, is an increasingly important practice. so if I were to do it all over again, I mean, I think, I feel like the future of med school is probably not only going to be studying like very hyper-focused things, but also has, ways to encourage people to think on a systems level.
Bon Ku: Yeah, and especially what you said about connecting things at different scales, I think is so needed in the practice of, of medicine because a health happens on such a hyper local basis, but at the same time, the larger system impacts it as, as well, and It's hard to connect those different threads and I'm just fascinated that you got into design, being from a family of healthcare workers. How did that happen?
Yeah, I actually studied architecture. that's kind of my entry point to design.
You were at the G S D at Harvard.
Joanne Cheung: to
the Graduate School of Design at the G S D, which has its delineators from the Bowhouse when Backman Gro was the, I guess the head of the school. I think some of that came from, I don't know if you have this experience with a family of, physicians, but they always wanna fix you
Bon Ku: I have no physicians in my family, so I was the first
physician in the family. Yeah. So there's no doctors in the
Joanne Cheung: Not accusing you of anything, but it's, you know, they're really good at spotting what's wrong. It's like, what's going on? Like, let me fix this , let me like, tell you what to do. so I'm sure that became, you know, maybe a bit of a burden for me just being like, I wanna have agency over not only my future, but like my kind of perspective on the world.
And I think what drew. To design is that it's something, it's a practice that connects history. So diagnoses, understanding isn't passed with actual concrete plans for the future and the action, necessary to take, to realize it. So I was, unsatisfied with only recognizing what's wrong, but I also wanted to build things to make things better so that doesn't happen again.
so that really drove me to design cuz it's a very future oriented practice.
Bon Ku: yeah, I think you just read my mind and described what drove me to design as well, but I'm not as articulate as you, so I was like, . So right now you're teaching a very cool class at Stanford with one of my favorite people is Steve Downs. Can you, tell us the title of that class
Joanne Cheung: Yeah. So the classes in collaboration with Steve and also, Sarah Singer, who's a professor at Stanford, and it's called Upstreaming Health. So the premise of the class is that health isn't something that starts at the hospital, actually. It begins upstream. It starts in your home, in your community, in your everyday behavior, in your everyday interactions.
And that's really the building block of good health. So the classes to explore what. Space called the upstream actually means. And so everything from what individuals can do to what their communities can do, and also how organizations can support the space because that's what, really bolsters health.
At a systems level. So it's, kind of a combination of human-centered design with systems thinking and also a lot of kind of community-based activist practices. and we get a pretty good mix of folks coming from health, but also business and also, engineering. which is great because, health is something that touches, you know, every aspect of life.
Joanne Cheung: So it's really not just people who are specialists who should care about it.
Bon Ku: So it's not a bunch of pre-meds in the room or, or physicians
and, but what, why, what,
Joanne Cheung: we do get, I mean, we, so for dschool classes you have to apply. So, I think we've had, we've had some applications where people are like, I'm a pre-med, but I really don't wanna be a doctor. Or like, I., you know, I'm . I see all the problems that are wrong. They're very, very intelligent, clearly, cuz they, they're a d c that the limitations of that practice.
So they wanna work in different ways and maybe the systems aren't in place for that kind of work yet. So they really wanna explore these alternatives. But very much, I think there's a kind of, General understanding amongst students and, youth now that like the status quo is not working. It's not just that if you just go down the normal track, even if it's successful by all metrics of one person's career, but it's not really having the kind of impact in the world that they wanna see.
So they're looking for different ways of working.
Bon Ku: Hmm. And I imagine you talk a lot about how like systems shape our everyday health, but. When, when I was in medical school, it just seemed medicine, what the way I always taught medicine. So individual behavior specific, like how do we live a healthy life, diet, exercise, sleep, let's focus on how can I get my patient to eat better, to exercise more, to sleep eight hours on, on a regular basis.
But it's focused on that one individual. but your emphasis is a little bit different in the.
Joanne Cheung: Yeah, I think all of those elements are still really, really important. Of course. though I think our emphasis might be what are the conditions that are necessary for. That to happen at all. So for example, if you think about, let's say the history of redlining right in the US and how that completely segregated neighborhoods and drained resources from certain neighborhoods, which led to, higher pollution in previously redlined neighborhoods, lack of trees and lack of public space and food deserts, right?
So when you think about eating, sleeping, getting exercise, The very conditions that enable that are not present simply from that history of redlining. So getting one individual to eat better, sleep better and workout is not gonna solve redlining as a kind of discriminatory practice.
Bon Ku: and for certain populations, that's a lot harder to do than in maybe certain populations that have more resources, more wealthier populations. Cuz there may be, there may be a park right there, or you have the resources to get eight hours of sleep at night cuz you're not working Two
Yeah. Health should not be a luxury product and I think in many ways it's increasingly become that. and I think we need to just rethink the very fundamentals for what people deserve for a good life. I, I love, I love that statement right there. Help is not a luxury product. We get this narrative in society that health is like, health and wellness is this luxury product. Like why, how do we get there? Like what? Why is that the overriding narrative around health?
Joanne Cheung: I think it has to do with a certain, I think there, well, let's say like some macro forces at work, right? you know, you have on the one hand, kind of this obsessive, unrelenting focus on productivity and everybody's overworking, burning themselves out. this kind of, yeah, hyper focus on growth. And then on the other hand, there's also, like the digital detox, self-care and all of these ways to help people kind of recalibrate and then feel better.
So how I. , the pendulum swing is too extreme, right? You can't have, on the one hand, from Monday to Friday, you're really burning yourself out. And then on Saturday and Sunday, you're gonna just like recenter yourself and then just go back to doing that all over again. That feels unsustainable, as a societal practice, if anything, because when you have these extremes, they're kind of parasitic in a way.
They reinforce one another. and all the while you have a hyper consumer society that is predatory on these extremes. So I feel like as a human, that's too much to cognitive dissonance. To swallow. Like we need more coherent lives where we don't have to constantly swing between, These unsustainable, yeah, swing it between these, we need a more coherent way of existing.
in your class? How do you, talk about designing health into everyday life? what does that look like in the present or in the future?
Joanne Cheung: One big thing is we encourage kind of thinking across scale. So as someone who's trained in architecture, this is something that feels pretty second nature to me. So for, you know, for everything you look at, what does it look like, the human scale, what does it look like at the building scale, the urban scale and the regional scale? And depending on your level of zoom, different things come into focus, right? It's kind of like when you zoom in on Google Maps. If you're really far out, you can only see certain patterns. You zoom in, you can see individual houses, individual people, and that's really important because the level of resolution, let's say, it gives you different levels of legibility, and only when things become legible can you start to care about it.
Because if you can't see it, you can't care about it. If you can't care about it, you can't manage it. And then it becomes this invisible force. Right? So one of the biggest things is that we, and this is pretty still pretty crude, but it's a good starting point, is that we encourage thinking at the individual scale, like the personal scale, then also the family as a unit, the community as a unit.
And then also campus, cuz these are students, so Stanford campus as a unit, and then Palo Alto as a unit and the Bay Area as a region, as a unit. And so across these different scales, the same topic might look very different. So you might look at, for example, eating, as your individual choices around your meals.
But when you look at the regional scale, you start to see food systems and, different types of land use and different flows, and different kinds of agricultural practices at work.
Bon Ku: mm.
Joanne Cheung: And then you realize that your choices around, what to eat and where it comes from is completely related to these macro patterns.
So I think constantly having that connection be very present in your mind, I think is very helpful. because it registers kind of human level choices with systems level impact.
Bon Ku: It makes a lot of sense when I'm telling a patient to do something at the bedside, that understanding that scale, will help me to understand maybe some of the barriers of some of my prescriptions that I give to, to give the patient understand. It's kind of both on a micro and macro scale of where that patient is and how they interact with these.
Different systems and I saw that, or I read a line that I really liked. You said, I really love the framing of health as part of a relationship. Can you impact what that means?
Joanne Cheung: Yeah, I think, there's certain things that are only definable relationally, right? So let's say. like a parent-child relationship, for example, or, a teacher and a student like some of these or what it means to be a mother. That's something that only arises in relation to something else. And that is a relation of care and some kind of interdependence.
I think, and this is David Graver will have something to say about this with the bureaucratization of society, but I think increasingly there are roles in which they're not existing in relation to others that are kind of siloed and onto themselves. and that leads to a way of being in the world and also working that is somehow abdicated a certain responsibility towards others.
And I, I believe that we're all better off if we could exist in relation to others, the other people, the environment and have that be foregrounded. And health is one of these things where, you know, it kind of has a multiplier effect, right? If I'm healthy, then my family is healthy. And like, if we're healthy then our neighborhood is healthy.
Bon Ku: And if our neighborhood is healthy, then we are also more likely to be healthy. especially during Covid ,
Joanne Cheung: Totally. And of course, this is the same goes with the environment, right? So, I really wanna advocate for a way of understanding health as a kind of accountability to others and a responsibility to others.
and that our sense of value is derived from, that kind of reciprocity. Is defined in reciprocity. I think that way of understanding health rather than like an individual metric, feels well That again, I think has more potential to nurture a systems level understanding and accountability That's which is what we need now.
Bon Ku: Because so much of health. And the marketing of health is individual behavior. Thinking of like an Apple watch or smartphone app that tracks how much sleep you get, how many steps that you've taken, what you've eaten that day. It just kind of focus on you only, and I wanted to pick your brain. Do you think that other countries or other societies that's less individual in nature as American society have a better understanding of health being framed in a relationship.
Joanne Cheung: I think this is inseparable from the rise of consumerism in the US in the last century or so. There's a great documentary by Adam Curtis called Century of the Self, which basically is about the invention of the individual as a consumer. So you're not a person anymore, you're, you're a person when you buy stuff, and all of you is defined by your purchasing patterns.
So this really, of course has getting blown to the extreme right. I think when, , when the economy sees individuals, only as consumers. Then you have, everything defined in terms of their own preferences and needs. Not necessarily their relationships with others, but treating like kind of their consuming patterns.
But of course, we're not just consumers, we're also creative beings and we're also existing in relation to others. And we also give, right? Like those things are less acknowledged. And those are the things that kind of tether us to other people, but not in the way that if you just box someone in as a consumer, it doesn't acknowledge that.
So I think only when we start to see beyond that definition of the individual, can we start acknowledging other ways of relating to people. you might see, I think in, in certain actually smaller, more rural areas. I had done a case study back when I was in grad school, and I went to study a bunch of small New Hampshire towns where people were actually very, very dependent on one another, but not in a way that's like, you know, my independence comes from the fact that I can buy anything on Amazon Prime , right?
It's more that I need to depend on people around me to help me with this or that. And so there's a kind of web.
Bon Ku: Mm-hmm.
Joanne Cheung: and of help, I think, you know, that somehow became exclusively associated with places where there's less resources or that are kind of more remote and isolated. But that, I don't think that has to be the case.
I mean, we've seen a lot of that during Covid, for example, like lots of mutual aid networks that are very active and essential. Why can't that just be the case, ? Why, why can't we just, really, formally acknowledge that these connections have value, even in a hyper-connected urban setting.
Bon Ku: Yeah, That just reminds me of the story that you told in the beginning of our conversation of how your mom had dropped you off when she's going to a shift at the hospital with another nurse to take care, to take care of you.
Joanne Cheung: Right? Right. And so many of these are, you know, social capital, right? Like it's, we rely on each other, and the connection has like no monetary implications whatsoever. But simply because we are in relation to one another, and that's important, and also that that is something that is not to be commodified, or especially extracted through commodification by another entity.
I think those things should remain cuz they're kind of sacred as connections between individual people. But we don't need a social media to mediate things like that.
Bon Ku: This reminds me of a theme I've been researching a lot lately around community health resilience.
Joanne Cheung: Mm-hmm.
Bon Ku: what role a neighborhood or a community on a micro level can play in determining their own health. Because health is delivered by healthcare institutions and you know, these large medical centers or the health department on a city, state, federal level, and humans and their communities in which they live are often passive recipients of health that's being delivered to them. So I just wanna pick your brain and ask you your thoughts on like, how can we design the health resilience of communities, especially, you know, coming off of this lingering pandemic and we know we're gonna face future crises and we know that some communities fare better than other communities.
Joanne Cheung: Yeah, totally. I think the whole framing of health delivery has never sat well with me because it has a very kind of, it's like a. Distribution model of health, right? You have a fulfillment center, let's say, and then when people need something, it gets delivered and then frames a person as someone who is completely lacks agency to create the conditions for their own flourishing.
But of course, as humans, we've always done that. So why is it that suddenly that capability is extracted away and we're totally become dependent on these monolithic systems? So this is actually the impetus behind, the first, mile health framing, which is that the first mile, which is like where people are , is where health lives.
And of course we need healthcare systems, but it should not be framed as a very paternalistic, you know, mmodel, in el,in like treats where people are as an area of deficit.
Bon Ku: and, and I blame US doctors on creating that paternalistic model.
Joanne Cheung: I mean, not necessarily. It's, I think it's in, it's really not only the healthcare system too. I mean, every system is complex and this is also a feature of systems. Is that ? It kind of dehumanizes right? Individuals, but I think we also need. Concentrations of expertise and, resources. So it's not to do away with them, but really to acknowledge that there are ways to center people's agency to acknowledge people's, like the fact that they're humans, and the complexities of their lives, without boxing them in into a data set.
Bon Ku: And like you, I, I hate the framing of. The delivery system. I just don't like that term. And I'm wondering what can we do to shift that narrative?
Joanne Cheung: I think, building power at the community level is important. I think that is a very difficult thing to do now. I think community, the definition of community has evolved in the last century. So, I mean before the urbanization that we have now, communities used to be like people who live near you and they're pretty homogenously, right?
and they're pretty isolating. You're not gonna have a lot of. Mobility, like leaving or even social mobility. but they happen to be people who just live near you. I think community now has evolved to mean, kind of people that you choose to be with who share a certain interest. So it's more of your kind of special interest aligned community.
Bon Ku: mm.
Joanne Cheung: I think that makes it pretty tricky because we need ways in which people who have differing needs, who are heterogeneous across age groups, race and everything are still able to, have the kind of care. And that doesn't mean that just a single delivery system is going to kind of solve all of their needs.
But in many ways, I think when you have a centralized delivery system model that is a part of, what it's offering, it's like a one size fit all model. So if you are really building power at the community level, then you need ways to enable people who are heterogeneous to all find ways to be healthy.
Bon Ku: I wish I could take your class and
Joanne Cheung: welcome to audit
Bon Ku: I, I, wish it was like a med school class that was required and. Do you have any stories of aha moments from students who, went into class thinking, oh, this is how health is, it's like healthcare delivery system context, and then, and they're like, whoa.
It's so much more than that.
Joanne Cheung: Yeah, because we started the class during Covid, you know, it's obviously very, very top of mind for everyone. especially people's psychological wellbeing. Like it was super top of mind. I think what has been some aha moments, not only for the students but for us, is that, like people play a lot of different roles. At all times, and I think that gets more and more complex. The farther along one one is in their lives. So when you're, let's say when you're a student, you might be someone's daughter, you might be a student, you might be a student at Stanford, you might be someone who lives in Palo Alto, and you might be a bunch of people's friends.
These are the kinds of roles you play. And then you start to think about the influence you have based on these roles. But later on you might run in organizations, you might be in an advocacy group, you might work for the government. And those roles have different levels of influence and power. So I think one of the things that the students are learning is that, you know, they, they need to start to see that the systems are made out of these different entities.
And these different kinds of roles that, and they can play multiple at once. So they could work in a healthcare system, but they can also advocate for doing treating health in a different way. and that sometimes they can be kind of dissonance with one another, but that's only because they're trying to do things against the grain.
And I think that's good
Bon Ku: Now for someone like me who works in this system that is so broken and it's so easy to become, so jaded, I guess when I, when I think about the future. But, at the beginning of the conversation, you said design is optimistic and I am curious to know your thoughts on when you look at the future of health, are you optimistic or pessimistic?
Joanne Cheung: I am optimistic, because I think there is. just as a Chinese American woman, I would not want to be alive at any other time. But now if I think about, you know, it's someone who's interested in a history I might look at a hundred years ago or 200 years ago and think like, oh, look at how things used to be then.
And then I'm like, oh wait, no, I'm not a part of that story. Like I wouldn't be allowed to go to school .
Bon Ku: Yeah.
Joanne Cheung: So it's really also not just health, but all other things, despite how messed up many things are, there's been a lot of progress made. So I'm, confident that we can continue working through this mess, and that's just the way it is, and that it's important to maintain optimism and not feel disillusioned by the gravity of the problem.
Bon Ku: Yeah. such a good perspective to have. If one of our listeners were to come visit you, Joanne, where would you take them out to eat?
Joanne Cheung: So I'm in Berkeley, so the Bay Area is of course, full of really good food, but my favorite place, which is not a long walk from me, here in Berkeley is this Thai temple with a name that is, I will not even attempt to pronounce. But the way it works is that, it's kind of, you exchange money for a bunch of tokens and then you use the tokens to get all kinds of different Thai food.
So there's like all the mochi buns and the noodles and whatever else, but, so it's kind of like a cafeteria. But the best thing is there's a huge lawn with like park tables. So it's really like a food festival every time you go. So super good vibes. And of course the weather is generally nice, so everybody's always eating outside and meeting people they've never met before.
I think this is like the perfect combination of kind of really interesting cultural heritage. Super good food. Really great social interactions. And just generally, the best of what eating a meal could be is to be together with people and outside. I love being
outside, so
Bon Ku: Oh, you're getting me hungry. , I'll put a link to that restaurant if it's okay with you. I don't, I dunno if I wanna blew up your spot, we'll put in your show notes.
Joanne Cheung: thing is, it's, it's, I guess not an official restaurant cuz it's actually a, a Thai temple. Like there are
Bon Ku: Oh. Like literally, a
Joanne Cheung: is literally, it is literally a Thai temple. So I think this is why there's a token system. So if like, actually you're making donations, the temple by eating the food, right?
Bon Ku: That is amazing.
Joanne Cheung: has a kind of a high temple currency where, you know, you use these food token.
Bon Ku: That's so cool.
Joanne Cheung: But yeah, there are also people praying and doing like kind of those kinds of things.
Bon Ku: Oh, I love that. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Joanne I'm so grateful that you took some time out to, chat with me.
Joanne Cheung: Yeah, it's been fun.
Bon Ku: You can find Joanne Cheung on Twitter at J O a N N E K C H E U N G. And reach out to me on Twitter at B O N K U on Instagram at D R B O N K U. Design Lab is produced by the amazing Rob Pugliese. Editing by Fernando Queiroz. The music was created by Emmanuel Houston and the cover design by Eden Lew. See you next week.
