PieLab

My role: 
Graphic designer, small business workshop planner, co-director of design space.

Main idea:
DESIGN IS ABOUT PEOPLE.

Tasks:
Worked collaboratively with other designers to design any print/web materials needed for PieLab, made collateral to sell in-store, planned fundraising events, organized community-building events, brought in speakers to lead business workshops, aided local business owners in business plan writing, communicated with press.

Large aspect: 
Wrote and received a $12,000 Design Ignites Change Grant from Worldstudio to work with local YouthBuild students (a national program high school dropouts to receive job training) to take pecans, an abundant local resource, and turn it into a pecan butter and brittle, profit-making product. This allowed us to teach them how to utilize local assets, the power of branding, how design works, aspects of marketing, how to communicate with customers, business math, filling internet orders, and shipping. The whole experience was a mutual exchange of learning, as hearing there stories taught me a lot of life lessons in return.

Skills:
Coming in as an outsider to build relationships and trust to gather stories and turn all of these stories and engagement into initiatives; networking, organizing, motivating, adjusting vocabulary and mentality to understand and communicate that it is all a “WE” thing, not an “I do for YOU” kind of thing (as a friend put it, “with, not for”).

Perk:
Through our connection with a University of Alabama student we were invited to be on a panel at a Kettering Foundation Conference centered the question: “How do we strengthen citizen engagement and community problem solving?” We were in the round-table discussion: “Stranger in a Strange Land”-how to come in as an outsider and do anything in a new place? This event was formative in my design-thinking philosophy development. See my post-event blog for further elaborated thoughts.

The story:
PieLab was (it still exists in a slightly different form) an experimental pie shop combined with a design studio in Greensboro, AL (population 2,700). Newly graduated in December of 2008, I spent the spring looking for an opportunity to use design for something that was people focused. Via a shot-in-the-dark email, I connected with a designer moving to Greensboro to work with Project M/PieLab. After spending a weekend there I was hooked. My southern instincts told me that it’s not okay to show up to something empty handed. Ergo, I had made some cookies and brownies. Who knew baking could open so many doors? They asked if I liked to bake which was followed by a “Could you come bake for us and hang out as a designer?” My initial role there for two months one summer was simply baking pies and working as a freelancer from the space. It was a dream summer of slow southern hot days baking, working, floating in the river, finding new ways to use the crops local farmers brought us, and getting a deeper sense of culture. I left for Nashville to find a paying job that fall, but returned the next January as soon as a grant was able to hire some of us. I returned in January to crank out six months of hard work until the grant ended. This has given me a huge notch in my belt of a well-rounded experience. I experimented, networked with people doing similar things, asked hard questioned, sculpted more of my design ideology and philosophy.
Part of the networking included a road trip taken with Amanda Buck and Megan Deal. Read more about the trip here.

The beauty of being in a small town with only a handful of your peers who are all creatives as well is that there is time to experiment and create-even random things like our awesome garden we planted. Long dinners with each other were the heart of the experience where conversations centered around design’s role in society, the changing direction of design, the emergent importance of design thinking, what is our calling as designers, etc, all found form over homemade pizza and wine. Dance parties often materialized.