Skip to main content Skip to footer

Dr. Lynn Wilson

Dr. Lynn Wilson is a circular design practitioner, researcher, and educator, who completed her PhD at the Adam Smith Business School, the University of Glasgow in 2022 - Cleaning the Loop. Driving Consumer Clothing Circularity, which investigated consumer clothing use and disposal experiences.

Dr. Wilson is the founder of Circular DS which provides consultancy and training services to businesses transitioning to circular business models and material practices. From 2016 -2107, she was Sector Manager – Manufacturing, Zero Waste Scotland, implementing the Circular Economy workstream, of the National Manufacturing Action Plan. Prior to this role, she was the Sector Manager - Textiles, Circular Economy team at Zero Waste Scotland, contributing to Making Things Last – A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland (2013-2016). In 2015, she undertook a Churchill Fellowship, spending one month in Japan, researching circular textile heritage, technology, and clothing retail systems to achieve a circular economy. Dr. Wilson is a non-executive board member of Architecture and Design Scotland and is a Fellow of the Arts, Commerce and Manufacture (FRSA).

Listen to the episode

Tune in to find out about:

 

  • Dr.Lynn’s personal background and journey in sustainability and circular economy.
  • The importance of translating research evidence into actionable policy, particularly through informed engagement with policymakers.
  • Insights from a White Paper presented to the Scottish Parliament, underscoring the need for evidence-based policy change to address key issues in clothing acquisition, use, and disposal.
  • How international supply chains present complex issues, including excessive waste and dumping in various countries, highlighting the global scope of the circular economy challenge.
  • How group training, exercises and discussions foster confidence, connections, and support among participants in their circular journeys.
  • How Dr. Lynn's passion for academic research and educational efforts underscores her commitment to comprehensive circular economy transformation.
  • And much more!

Teaser

S7E16 Audiogram image

 

Emily Swaddle  00:10

Hello, and welcome back to HappyPorch Radio season seven. Today Barry and I had the great opportunity to speak with Dr. Lynn Wilson. Lynn is a Circular Design practitioner, researcher, and educator. She also founded Circular DS, which provides consultancy and training services to businesses transitioning to circular business models and material practices. She's got many strings to her bow, and she sounds like a very busy lady. And I'm really glad she found the time to speak to us because it was a really great conversation.

Barry O'Kane  00:46

Yeah, it's totally amazing how much everybody we've spoken to this season and how much they're all doing. And I think that was really clear, and Dr. Lynn's work here as well. So there's so much going on. One theme that we didn't touch on in the conversation, which I'm thinking about now is, in her early career, she did some work in Botswana. And in the previous season, we looked at Circular Economy across Africa, and how, and in both cases, both what Lynn said today, and then what we wanted the themes we saw in that previous season was how important understanding the context is, and where people actually are, whether that geopolitically and sort of where you are, in terms of the economy and the country and location you're in, or where you are in terms of literally where I am at home. And she then also talked about the research she's done recently about textiles and clothing in Scotland, and literally people at homes, and what are they literally doing with where they acquire news and get rid of or pass on this? There's so much there, this is really powerful. But that theme of that context and really understanding came across really strongly for me.

Emily Swaddle  01:52

Yeah, I think that's a good insight, because I think it also came up when she was talking about the training that Circular DS are going to start providing as well, that really, that is focused on allowing people to understand their context more thoroughly, so that they can get a clearer picture. And the transition to circularity is like supported by that understanding of their current context.

Barry O'Kane  02:17

Another thing that really stood out for me in that conversation was the way she talked about policy. And tying in that research and those understandings and the data and the output and the understanding of where people are, and the motivation to actually do something that aligns incentives with those people. And policy rather than those being two completely separate things policy happening and this theoretical, sort of, as you said, done to people rather than with people. And I think she describes that really clearly, and was able to tie those things really concretely together, which is often hard to do. We've touched on policy and a number of conversations in the season. And I think this is another example of how important that is, and how important it is that we don't treat them as isolated. You know, we need to be holistic about all of this.

Emily Swaddle  03:04

Yeah, we sometimes talk about, sort of, the system of circularity, but obviously, that belongs in much bigger systems itself. You know, it's a system within systems within other things, you know, you can't, as you say, you can't isolate it. And so yeah, I mean, we've talked a lot about, sort of, social things coming in, and like environmental stuff, connecting with them. We talked about that quite a lot. But it's nice to get a sort of concrete example of that, as you say. 

Barry O'Kane  03:30

So much there, so much. So without any further ado, let's meet Dr. Wilson.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  03:35

So thank you so much, Barry, for inviting me on to podcast today. I really enjoy your series, and I'm looking forward to talking to you. My name is Dr. Lynn Wilson, and I'm a Business Consultant in the field of the Circular Economy, sustainability and work with businesses to develop Circular Economy strategies and ESG policies within their business. I'm also, as an Academic, I'm a Consumer Behaviour Specialist, and I specialised in the consumer transition to Circular Economy in terms of circulation of product and behaviour change.

Barry O'Kane  04:12

Awesome. Thank you so much, and welcome to HappyPorch Radio. One of the things we're really interested in this season is the journey that takes people to doing this work. So could you tell us a little bit more about what led you to this point, and I guess why you're doing this work now.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  04:27

Thank you, Barry. So yeah, so I've been reflecting on my sort of career journey, a lot recently trying to piece together the narrative and to understand how I got here myself. And I think there are three key themes within my journey. And the first is people. I'm a real people focus person. And I'm really passionate about the empowerment of people, all of us, really, but the most disempowered, how we enable their voice. I'm really passionate about the environment and that has evolved from having lived internationally in areas where resources are really challenged, and I'll speak about that in a minute. And more recently, my key focus and interest in my journey is in policy and how we influence policy through research. And so I started off and trained as a Textile Designer in Duncan of Jordanstone, college of art Dundee University in the 80s and 90s. And then went on to Nottingham Trent University and did my Masters in Fashion Textiles. And I realised after all of that, I really didn't. The industry wasn't for me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. There were, you know, early rumblings about the toxicity of the fashion industry at that time. I think it was potentially just looking at the industry, I could see there was something wrong, there was something wrong with society in the way that we were consuming fashion. It wasn't the way I was brought up. My mom always referred to me as big boned. And that was just a code for beeing just a small, chunky child who needed to, she always needed to, she always said she needed to buy clothing that was robust and hard wearing. And so I grew up, never, you know, never haven't really experienced cheap clothing or what would be considered low value clothing, but sell household brands,  M&S really would have been the order of the day then. And from there, so I didn't take a track in industry, but I still retained a career freelance as a textile designer, create my own collections, working on swatch designs for other companies. But my main source of career was in education. So I worked, I started in vocational training in high-security prison, HM prison Shotts. And then from there, I went into international development, I had a wonderful opportunity to work in Botswana, Botswana is 87% Kalahari Desert. So resources are really finite. And I worked with the vocational training infrastructure in evolving textile design programmes. At that time, the Botswana government had invested in Asian companies coming into Botswana to set up manufacturing production companies. It was a sort of five year development programme. And so the British government had sort of funded part of that to increase capacity. But after three years, four years, in fact, that programme finished and I went to work, I decided to stay in Botswana and I worked freelance with indigenous tribes in the Kalahari Desert who were transitioning from being a egalitarian society to unfortunately to a consumer society because the Botswana government wanted their land for diamond and tourism licences, so they could no longer hunt or gather and needed new forms of income. So I was brought in to teach to this product design, really products for the tourist industry. And then after that, I came back to the UK and retained by practice as a Textile Designer and working mainly in Arts Management. But the third sort of key area of my career has been policy. And taking those experiences of working internationally, working with people, working creatively. I ended up actually working in planning policy for a national charity that engages the public in time planning. And again, it seems quite a leap and quite odd, but it really appealed to me because it was about how the planning system needs to be made more accessible to all of us in order for everyone to participate. So that was a National Charity Planning Aid for Scotland, led by planning volunteers, and that really engaged me in policy, which then led me full circle back to my passion for textiles. I ended up moving on to work for Zero Waste Scotland, in the Circular Economy team, where it was the very early days, we were the first sort of pioneering team on the Circular Economy strategy for Scotland. And that was a really exciting time, I had the role of the Textile Manager for Scotland, Circular Textile Sector Manager and I was able to really support the shaping of building capacity in the industry, introducing what Circular Economy is, what it looks like from a business model perspective, particularly in Textile and Fashion and ringing industry leaders to Scotland who had been working in this field for longer to really inspire the industry. Parallel to that I worked on the Sustainable Clothing Action Plan for the UK and launched the Love Your Clothes Campaign, which was consumer facing and again, was trying to engage consumers in buying less or choosing better and essentially circulating, increasing the circulation of clothing. What I realised with policy is that I felt like it was being done to people and not with people. And I really wanted to take time out to really understand how we improve that policymaking process. So I left Zero Waste Scotland, which was a great time and had the wonderful opportunity to go to Glasgow University and do my PhD on clothing, how we address consumer behaviour, including circularity. And I looked at how we, as consumers, as people, how we make those clothing decisions about what we buy, what we keep what we dispose off, and the PhD title is "Cleaning the Loop: Driving Consumer Clothing Circularity." And I guess you've got some questions about that.

Barry O'Kane  10:56

Yeah, thank you so much. First of all, thanks for sharing the journey there. One of the things that I'm really enjoying about this season of the podcast is, I guess, how the journeys are different for bringing people to this point. And one question I have for you based on that, and that's something that our guests have commented on is kind of the Zeitgeist if you like changing, so particularly thinking about circularity, and particularly over maybe the last 5, 10 years. So what have you seen there? What have some of those changes been, do you think?

Dr. Lynn Wilson  11:24

 I suppose the change is in awareness. So business awareness, first of all consumer awareness in the last 10 years, 5 to 10 years. But thinking about that, I would say it's only in the last 2 years, 3 years since Cop26, that things have really ramped up. But in the Circular Economy space, when I look at the presentations I was doing in 2013/14, and how I'm presenting to business now, nothing much has changed. It's very, very slow. And you're still introducing the same principles of the Circular Economy, still, I guess, debunking the jargon. It's all about circulation. It's not really, Circular Economy is the jargon, but it's about circulation, about circulation of everything, how we keep what we already have in circulation. And that goes right from the root of all the raw material resources we have in the world, we only have one, you know, as the great quote from Mark Twain "Buy land, because they're not making it anymore". You know, this is all we got. So we have to keep circulating it. And we have to keep it pure. And we have to keep it as clean and pure as possible, because more polluted it gets, with nowhere to put it. So it's we're going to implode. So that idea that of a circulation debunking the language of the Circular Economy, and just I feel it's like everyday, one by one, just informing, engaging in another conversation. And every day, as you're engaging in that conversation about the Circular Economy you're learning more like, so in my business, I'm working with businesses on the supply chain. And I'm really passionate about how we understand this, our supply chains for a lot of businesses don't understand the supply chain and don't really engage with it as well as they could. They're just too busy doing the business and trying to firefight a lot of the time. And I was reading someone the other day just talking about how to get manufacturing in the UK, it's really difficult. It's not as easy as you think we went to do on shoring. We went to reduce our car in the supply chain. But it's really, it's not that easy. And if you find really quality manufacturers that probably booked up for the next 2 or 3 years, particularly in the Textile and Fashion sector, or food production. And so we have key challenges there. So whilst in terms of the last 5 to 10 years, we have more awareness, and we have more awareness of what we need to do. The key challenges, we're still trying to understand how to pivot to be able to do that. To do circularity, to do circulation, to do reduction of production, increase economic models of circularity.

Emily Swaddle  14:25

Lynn, I'm interested when you spoke about your, sort of ,career journey so far, a thread that I noticed was supporting people through change. And you know, that's what you talked about in Botswana and with the policy stuff and also at Zero Waste Scotland. This idea that change is happening and you're supporting people through that. You've talked already about a lot of the things that sort of need to change a lot of the challenges, I'm wondering what you may be have learned over your career, about how people change about, like, how these systems change and what people need in place to support us all through that. And how that makes you feel about this, you know, potential change towards circularity.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  15:13

Thank you, Emily. And thanks for that observation. Yeah, I think it's really accurate it is, for me about supporting people through change, supporting people. I think the other key thread is creatively, in a creative way. And I think part of it is about, we're not all adaptable to change, we don't adapt to change very easily. And I realised myself really recently, I don't adapt to change very easily. I'm not an easy adapter. And sort of in a lot of things, I get a bit amatory and I get a bit stubborn, stick my heels in and I'm like, oh, no, I can't do that. I'm not going over that threshold. And so it's about how I think about the people around me and how I garner support and how people then try to support me through transitions and adaptability and pushing me on to the next stage. And a lot of that is sort of reflecting on how you do encourage people through information, through showing them examples, through tapping into their resources. So just thinking, for example, way back to the narrow sand women in the Kalahari, they were exceptionally creative women. They were a group of women who were really supportive of each other, they were really creative. They were bewildered and distressed about what was happening to them. But they had an inner, you know, survival. They wanted to survive. And they wanted to understand how it could do that, how could they move on to the next stage, even although there was resistance, of course, there was resistance, it was changing their whole way of life. But what happened was that once we got into the workshop situation, and releasing their creative energy, they were so immersed in it, and they began to feel empowered through this creative practice. And then that began to, I think, when we do that, we then garner power from that as individuals and as communities. And then we start to see how we can work with change, and how we can work with change to our advantage. So that we can see, okay, change is coming. But how do we manage this change? How do we use our inner resources to really work with this for the good of everyone. And I've seen that in different communities that I've worked in, whether it's about health and well-being, whether it's about safety in a community, having worked in some of the more socially challenged communities in Scotland in my earlier career, how that if you empower people through skills, through helping them to tell their story, and helping them to engage in the story around them. So this key issue that we have right now of the climate crisis, if you keep explaining the climate crisis to people who just panic, we panic, we get distressed about it. It's about, I feel like starting from, well, where is everyone at? Where is their point of grounding right now?  And if you want to take them on that journey of adapting to a new world where change is inevitable, then we have to really empathise and support the starting point. And a lot of the time, I don't see that happening. We seem to, particularly with young people, it seems to be the narrative is one of panic. And yes, the issue is urgent. But it's about how we really learn the starting point of someone to not show that adaptability.

Emily Swaddle  19:02

The focus is quite often on the problem and not so much on the potential solutions or the image of where we could maybe go to get through this problem.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  19:13

Absolutely. And I think that's when, I mean, it was a key reason why I went to do this PhD at Glasgow University, and I spent several years studying consumer behaviour. And then I'm a qualitative researcher. So I had the huge privilege of working with 30 households in Edinburgh, over a period of six months going into their homes, observing what they were doing, interviewing them all about clothing, use and disposal. What I was trying to understand was what people were experiencing in terms of clothing use that led to disposal, and then how they made that decision. And how that decision then impacts on the clothing, recycling or reuse system. Because the Circular Economy and in circularity, to make that transition, we need it. Particularly if it's the industrial transition, we need a critical mass, we need a critical mass of materials, whether it's about the reuse the recirculation of a product, or if it's about that processing, post- consumer or post-industrial processing of material, we need a critical mass. So we need everyone to be doing something very similar in order to get that critical mass. But at the moment, we don't really know what we're doing. We don't understand why we don't have enough critical mass to make a circular system. So what I wanted to understand was what was actually happening. So that we can then build on that and say, Okay, so what I found was, I found, for example, with clothing, reuse clothing disposal, consumers are completely confused. Messaging is really confusing. Services are sporadic. And, of course, there is the issue of overconsumption. Every household including my own, has an abundance of clothing, of product. Then I think back to my colleagues in Botswana  when I was in the vocational training school, they maybe had five garments in their wardrobe, whereas the average garment in the UK is 118 pieces. So the idea of we do have an abundance, but what is actually happening,  how are we making all these decisions? And why? What are the external factors? What are the internal factors that lead us to want so much, to have so much, and to use it or not to use it? And then how we dispose of it?

Barry O'Kane  21:47

It's really fascinating. One of the tensions I hear and what you're describing , you've got this very, real world, let's understand exactly what's happening literally in the home. What am I doing with my own tech, my own clothes, my own fashion stuff. And there's an excellent video, which we'll share in the Show Notes, a YouTube video where you and some colleagues have talking about specifics about repair. And that's very sort of concrete and real. And then you have this other wing of the work that you're doing, which is the policy level, which always feels like this very high level, moving glacially slowly, sort of conceptual, almost. How do you bridge the gap there? Because you're straddling both in a way.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  22:26

It's about, well, I've had a huge privilege recently of writing a White Paper for that was presented at the Scottish Parliament in April. And what we wanted to do with that White Paper was we had a framework of, it's called evidencing the need for a national clothing circularity, strategy citizen circularity strategy. And what we tried to do was create it around a framework of acquisition, use and disposal. And that White Paper comes directly from the data from my research. So what we wanted to show in the parliament, in the paper is that we have real evidence. Okay, you could say it's a small sample, but it's a really, it's a deep sample. It's from deep research. And it is the starting point of the conversation about we need to understand more about what people are doing. But this is what they have said, here are the key issues around acquisition, use and disposal of clothing that we need to address. And so I think the first stage with policy is having that platform and having clear evidence to bring to that platform, because evidence is key with policy, and with ministers and MPs and MSPs. The more evidence they have and the more the critical mass of all of us saying, look, here's the evidence, here's the evidence, we need change, you need to sort this out, then hopefully, we get that swell of change. I mean, in Scotland, our main vehicle for policy shift is the Circular Economy bill. And for us, it's about how do we really lobby in that bill? How do we take our evidence and say you need to pay more attention to this. And the evidence from research says that there are two data sets- there's the shocking one that says only 4% of household waste is clothing or textile related, but it emits 32% of carbon emissions. Now, that's quite a horrendous figure. And there is another data set. And another way of measuring that, that says it's not as much as 32%. It's around 17%. But that is still and phenomenal amount of carbon from one household action of disposing of a product in the household bin. But we don't seem to be at a policy level ready, like we have been with food over the last 10 years, we don't seem to be ready to really address this issue. And I think, as a researcher, it is still a bit just keeping pushing the evidence, keeping finding the political allies cross party, or work sits within the cross party working group, Circular Economy  cross party Working Group and Scotch parliament. And so it's about working cross party and trying to gain that support across civil society, NGOs and government to push policy, and also to engage with Westminster. Because in Scotland, it's about the amount of clothing, and we don't really have control over what comes into Scotland in terms of big brands. But what we can do at our local or national level, is encourage people to reduce what they're buying. But we need to give them alternatives. We need to understand what's happening in the household, in order to work with policy. So for example, households where there are a lot of children, different ages and stages, how do we incentivize rent to quote, children's clothing rental models, children's clothing leasing models that really help the family budget, not just increasing circularity, for the sake of it, but actually solving a problem. We see in Sweden, Sweden tried reducing the VAT on repair, so that people increased repair of products, they reduced it to 6%. So that, that really incentivize people to repair. So the idea of how policy then informs change that is really going to help this. You're absolutely right Barry, that is so slow, but we just have to keep producing the evidence and finding the critical friends to make it happen.

Barry O'Kane  27:00

Yes, thank you. That's really interesting. You sort of said there really pulled together those things, like you say that they're the sort of real world concrete understanding and out of that coming data, which helps inform policy, both to make it happen and to make it actually impactful. The other thing I liked about what you said about is those incentives, really understanding incentives, no point in circularity for its own sake or not trying to address the reality of where people are. Just to sort of change tack slightly. You mentioned the international scope, there a couple of times, in particular with clothing and supply chains moving internationally. And it's really interesting that you mentioned your work in Botswana, because there's so many stories, and so much of the problem, if you like ,as flow two ways, so too much stuff coming in but also then things getting shipped out and dumped in Ghana, or whatever and real problems there. But rather than going into that, I wanted to transition a little bit into the another area of your work, which is the training and the educational stuff. So tell us a little bit about that side of your work.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  27:54

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So with the training and educational so with training is a circular design synergy. It's about training, with business or for business. And that's very much about we have designed a new training programme. It's credited by the CPD service, Continuing Professional Development Service. So it has that purple tick, because we felt that that was a really good way to go in terms of reaching out to a broad range of people in the supply chain, who could benefit from this training and our training is based on our research on materials.  I had the huge privilege of being a Creative Entrepreneur within Creative Informatics at Edinburgh University. And using that funding, we were able to take a deep dive into material supply chains because my mantra is that there is no such thing as a sustainable material. There is only a material and a circular system. And we can reduce the materials we use cause we can be smarter than our design. We can design for circularity sustainability, but unless we are working in that whole systems approach, I'm not convinced we can really call ourselves a sustainable business. And so this training is about explaining what we mean by that and taking businesses through a transition from linear to circular. And whilst I have that pure approach in that pure mantra, with our training, it's about saying, okay, that is the ultimate. But what is the journey we're on to get there. And our training is about taking you on a journey. For there's six different modules that are all based on materials, whether that's regenerative, or biochemical materials. We also look at business models, we look at consumer behaviour. And then we look at what the transition to Circular Economy might look like in your business over the next, you know, 1 ,2, 3 ,5, 10 years, what you want to focus on. And so we're really setting stage in that process. We'll have our first cohort this autumn, and say small groups of 12 professionals across our first cohort, we're really looking at procurement, procurement public ,private procurement, because we want to really engage people in training about understanding not only what they're producing and what they're engaged in sending out to the world, but what is coming into the business? And do they know enough about the sustainability? The circularity? Do they know enough about their supply chain, in order to really evolve into a more sustainable circular model. So that's our sort of corporate training site. And then from an education side, I continue my practice in academia, and have every year I have the huge privilege of teaching MSC students and taking them through a dissertation. And what's really fascinating about that, in terms of being in a business school at the University of Glasgow and the Architecture School at Edinburgh University. And it is a really broad international spectrum of students. And so for example, my students in architecture at Edinburgh University, recent subjects have been about post-war reconstruction. How do you create circularity, of post-war rubble? How do you really look at unpacking that? Or how do we look at in terms of climate change? And disaster zones? How do we develop post-disaster shelters that are sustainable, that are circular. So it's really interesting and rich, looking at these real world problems, and taking me back to that international experience that I had, and how we're then looking at that in research through a circular lens. Absolutely fascinating. So it's really important for me, in terms of going back to your question about where I started in my career. It is so important for me to be grounded in both of those educational camps at a sort of professional business level, imparting knowledge and skills and sharing ideas of business. And then that educational, that higher education level where we have the privilege of taking a deep dive into these real social challenges and environmental challenges that are with us, and are going to become increasing.

Emily Swaddle  32:36

That's interesting about your training, Lynn. The process that you described, we've spoken a lot this season to consultants, and, you know, other sort of trainers in this space. And a lot of it focuses on working individually with businesses, you know, like one on one sort of thing. We'll look at case by case scenario. And what I'm hearing from your training programme is a bit more, I don't want to say generalised in the sort of bad way, but it's a bit more open in that way, I suppose. Is the idea that that's like a starting point. And the businesses can go on to get more, sort of specific support, or is the the idea that this sort of more general approach can spread further, faster? What's your hopes for it?

Dr. Lynn Wilson  33:24

Thanks. Absolutely. Emily. Yeah, it is an introductory level. But it's an introductory level, not to the Circular Economy. It is an introductory level, to the transition to circular supply chains. So it is about learning together. It is about building confidence, it is about unpacking creative thinking. So providing a space because it's in person training. And it's one day- each module is one day. And so it's about learning together. It's about creating that space where we unpack the linear economy. Where are we at? And what I want people in the course to start with is really grounding themselves. Where am I? Am I absolutely sure where I am in my own supply chain. What control I have over that? What my role is in relation to carbon emissions? So in relation to Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, where am I? What is my responsibility? What is my contribution? And what is my influence? What's my power? So that's what we're really trying to unpack, and then that transition to Circular Economy. So what could help you to release your power? What could help you know, that you really fully understand where you are, where you sit? How do you then change that through the transition to Circular Economy and circular business models  or be on that journey. And so it's a bit giving confidence to then yeah, take the next level. But what I really want participants to do is take this knowledge back to the colleagues, to take it back to the company, back to the, whether it's the factory floor, or the boardroom, to take it back and say: I've been on this journey, I feel like I really understand where we are at now, in terms of the challenge that we have, and how we could get there. And I've got some tools, though, that I could really I'd like to us all to take forward. So it is about if you are a sole trader, if you are a one person business, and you're coming on our training, again, it's about who are you working with? Are you working with the right partners? Who are the partners in your supply chain? Are you aware of them? Do you know them? Are they fully aligned with your business and your business aspirations in relation to climate change? And the GHG Protocol? So, yeah, I would say it's general, it's introductory, but it's not general in sayin:, Okay, we're going to introduce you to the Circular Economy, we're going to introduce you to your circular journey to reduce your carbon emissions.

Emily Swaddle  36:22

It sounds like a very reflective process, almost like coaching people through this journey, as you say, sounds really nice.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  36:30

Yeah, it's very reflective. It's about group learning. It's about reflecting together. Quite a lot of the courses are about group exercises, group participation, about how we learn together about how we build confidence together, how we build connections together, how we build support for each other, on this circular journey, because it can be really lonely, and trying to adapt adapting. Knowing if you're doing the right adaption. Who is it right for? And is it right for me? Is it right for my business? Is it right for my supplier, you know, we need really deep, confident conversations. And we need to have the confidence and be supported to have that confidence to have those conversations and to work together. Because working together is critical.

Barry O'Kane  37:20

Thank you so much. Just looking at the clock. Unfortunately, we're starting to run out of time. So one final question for this conversation, Lynn, is what would you say is the next big step for you? What are you most excited about in terms of what's coming next and all of your work?

Dr. Lynn Wilson  37:35

Thank you. Yeah. So what's coming for me next is a lot more research. So I'll be making an announcement sooner. But what that means, but I'll have an opportunity to do a lot more academic research, and to really do more qualitative research, more lab-based research, more projects that really not only do the research, but publish our findings, and with academics and academia are often accused of being in the ivory tower. But what I see over the years is if you don't have those academics in the ivory tower, you don't have those consultants, you know, who are really analysing this data, or you don't have policy analysing the data, really reflecting and thinking and arguing. What did the academics find? What did that rigorous research find that then we can then work with. So I'm really looking forward to two things, to doing more academic research and publishing. And I'm really looking forward to developing and delivering our training, and really getting that going. And our first cohort as I say, will be in the autumn, we still have places available, and I'd love your audience to get in touch if they would be interested to learn more about the training. We've got a taster sessions coming up as well and you can get in touch with us about those to see if this is the kind of right training for you. You can just do the six modules. You can just do one module, or you can join all six to obtain the full certificate. So I'm really excited about both of those journeys. And I think what's most exciting is that I have built lovely teams around me in both camps. And I'm really looking forward to working with my teams, to really engage in both.

Barry O'Kane  39:26

That does sound exciting. Brilliant. And so for the listeners who want to find out more about that training or anything else that you do, where should they go?

Dr. Lynn Wilson  39:32

Yes, if they could, our website is www.circular-ds.com. But my colleague, if you could get in touch with [email protected]. Martha is our Business Development Manager and Guru and all things Circular Design Synergy.

Barry O'Kane  39:54

And as usual, we'll put the links to that. We'll also link to the YouTube video and the paper and the other things that we've mentioned in this conversation inn the Show Notes and HappyPorch Radio. That's circular-ds.com for those listening. Thank you so much, Lynn. Really appreciate your time today. That's been a really fun conversation.

Dr. Lynn Wilson  40:10

Thank you so much for your time, Barry, and privilege to be invited. Thank you very much.

Emily Swaddle  40:15

Thank you, Lynn.  

Thank you for listening to this episode of HappyPorch Radio. You can find past episodes, transcripts and Show Notes at happyporchradio.com. You can also get in touch with us there and let us know what you think or if you have any ideas or comments. Please rate the podcast, share and subscribe so that more people can find the show.

 

Barry O'Kane  40:38

Thanks for listening. My name is Barry O'Kane. I founded HappyPorch who fund and support this podcast. At HappyPorch we do technology and software development for purpose led businesses and we're particularly excited about the role of digital as an enabler for the Circular Economy. If you're working on solutions to the big problems we face today, problems like climate change, biodiversity loss and global inequality then let's connect,visit happyporch.com and get in touch.

 

Emily Swaddle  41:02

And I'm Emily Swaddle, podcaster coach, facilitator and storyteller. You can find me on my other podcast, the Carbon Removal Show, and you can find out more about that project and everything else I do at emilyswaddle.com where you can also subscribe to my Newsletter All about Rest. If you're interested in anything I do, feel free to connect. You can email me on [email protected]