Hasta La Ideas

This is the second half of a case study by Chicago’s Greater Good Studio, who recently set out to redesign school lunch. See the first part, including Lessons 1–4, here.

Text by Sara Aye / Greater Good Studio

Lesson 5: Ask what you can make and measure.

One concept we’d like to highlight is called “Courses,” and it eliminates the lunch line completely. Kids go straight to their tables, where the food is served to them by LRAs, one course at a time. Rather than getting one quick moment to choose a whole tray, the Courses system gives kids four moments to choose their dishes: carrots or broccoli, salad with dressing or without, chicken or tofu, apple or orange. And each moment of choice lasts as long as they need—there’s no one waiting in line behind them. They can see what their friends are eating and feel supported when trying something new. Plus, each new dish brings a small rush of anticipation, greatly increasing the focus on food. The process allows adults to decide the order of the courses, so if they want kids to eat more salad, they can just put the salad first. (I’ve never seen kids get so excited about salad as they did with our prototypes!)

What’s great about the Courses system is that it bears striking resemblance to something we’re all familiar with: a restaurant. We simply had to apply that service to a new context. However, all services require people, and the people who needed to change their behavior the most were the LRAs. So we listened closely to make sure we were supporting their desired behaviors too. We heard that the LRAs’ favorite part of their job was interacting with kids. They’d rather be chatting with a child than dishing food onto a tray. While the current system gives them one interaction point at the big serving station, the Courses system gives them four. They can be closer to the kids, and therefore more helpful, when they are out among the tables.

When we prototyped the concept with real kids and real food at AGC, we heard lots of positive feedback from students. They liked that the bowls were lighter and smaller than trays, giving them confidence when carrying them to the trash. They liked that the bowls gave them more elbow room at the tables. And they even liked that when they inevitably spilled their milk, it didn’t spill into the tray and make their meal soggy.

But the most encouraging result of our behavioral prototyping came from something the kids couldn’t tell us—something we observed in their eating behavior. It was an increase in eating balanced meals. Kids with trays often ate one, maybe two of the four food items. Kids with Courses sampled all four. Not only did they eat more and waste less, they ate more balanced meals—a metric that the public school system would actually care about, because it sounds suspiciously like health.

So the lesson for designers is to ask not only what you can make, but what you can measure. The only way this concept will be replicated at other schools is if we can prove quantitatively that kids eat more balanced meals, and that balance affects health. Measuring this is tricky, but we’ve just completed our study of balance pre-Courses. We intend to study balance with a trial of Courses very soon, and we’re optimistic about the results.

Lesson 6: Design for every last barrier.

The physical elements of Courses are a collection of plates and bowls, long trays to hold them and a cart to bring them around the room. Sounds fine when you’re talking about one table, but when you realize that you need 600 bowls, you start to discover the unintended consequences of this change. One thing that came up right away: how are
we going to do all these dishes?

The current trays are washed in 15 dishwasher cycles, which takes about an hour and a half. When we loaded our prototype bowls into the dishwasher trays and did the math, they would take 20 cycles, adding an extra half hour of dishwashing onto someone’s job. We knew that this small issue might actually be the difference between the whole system working or coming crashing down. The final bowls and trays are designed to be shorter and flatter, making them more compatible with the current dishwashing system.

The lesson here is to go willingly toward every last barrier, and not stop until they’ve all been uncovered. After all, the reason that most social problems aren’t solved is because there are barriers in place. Often really little, really stupid barriers. Decision-makers go for the big picture but forget the nuanced details. It’s our responsibility to challenge those barriers head-on with our designs. Find them, understand what’s really going on, and see if compromises can be made. Because we can’t afford to sacrifice time and money and food and health because our bowls don’t fit in the dishwasher.

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