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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With additional editorial support from Nathan Jones, Keith Lampi, Gaylon White, Jos de Wit

Natural disasters can happen anywhere with little or no warning. When they do, they threaten community water sources and jeopardize public health by destroying vital pipelines or existing sanitation systems allowing the introduction of contaminants into the drinking water supply. One of the most immediate concerns post-disaster is providing a supply of clean, safe hydration to survivors to help prevent the occurrence and spread of waterborne diseases.

“Water is one of the first things that a victim of a natural disaster has to have to survive,” says Nathan Jones, vice president of government and institutional sales at HTI. “Many of the deaths that occur from natural disasters don’t happen because of the disaster itself, but what happens later—the waterborne disease that sweeps through the population.”

Every few years, villages in Mudimbia, Kenya are destroyed from floodwaters.

Humans can only live for a few days without hydration. In fact, waterborne illness can be the leading cause of death in the aftermath of a disaster. According to UNICEF, 1.5 million children die of waterborne illnesses every year. One in five children worldwide die from diarrhea—that’s more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. On any given day, over 50% of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by people suffering from water borne disease.

Today, more than 1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water and the United Nations predicts that by 2025, 2/3 of the world’s population will face periodic and severe water shortage.

Starting in a Corvallis, Oregon, garage in 1987, Keith Lampi, now executive vice president and chief operating officer for Hydration Technology Innovations (HTI), Robert Salter and some college friends began focusing on how forward osmosis could be used in various humanitarian and industrial applications. In 1988, Lampi and Salter founded HTI in Albany, Oregon, with the purpose of utilizing their engineering and chemistry expertise to pioneer innovative membrane technology research using forward osmosis as a foundation.

When a fire destroyed HTI’s Albany facility in 2007, the disruption ironically allowed Lampi and his team a bit of space to work on some of the world’s wicked water problems. From those efforts, the HydroPack was born—an emergency hydration solution created specifically for use during the critical first days after a natural disaster.

Victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti received HydroPacks

“Our earliest forward osmosis pouch was a two-liter bag that we had developed for the military. But it required radio frequency welding and was fairly expensive to make,” says Dr. Jack Herron, director of product development at HTI. “Our desire was to create a relatively inexpensive pouch for disaster relief. The picture I had in mind was a 10-year-old child in a flood in India. What would he be attracted to and want to drink? What could he use properly without training? I knew from my days as a soccer dad that kids love juice pouches, so that was sort of the model. We also wanted to utilize a heat-seal process to keep the cost down. The HyrdroPack was the result.”

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With the promise of a single tool that can replace the pen, paper and repetitive inventories of books at schools, a multimedia eReader tablet provides a multipurpose educational tool that not only lets the student read and write, but can also go one step further and engage the student directly, replacing sometimes dull and lifeless teaching methods that can marginalize students with different learning styles and habits.

While the western world has been talking about introducing better educational tools for years, schools elsewhere across the globe have taken a major step toward incorporating tablets into their curriculum. A recent report from Pyramid Research shows tablet sales are set to skyrocket as South Korea vows to move to an all-tablet education curriculum by 2015. India and Thailand are close behind. Educators are looking for improved methods to prepare students for admission into professional college programs like engineering, medicine and business management.

In 2010 Luminum InfoTek approached Lumium (although our names are similar there is no connection). Their vision was to create and introduce a handheld wireless electronic device for students with age- and skill-appropriate learning content. Out of this came the Tuto eReader. “Tuto” is a shortened version of the word “Tutor”, because with Tuto, the hope is that students would be able to teach themselves.

As a vertically integrated design and engineering firm, our job was to design not only the hardware components of the learning device and how it would look and feel, but also the embedded software design and learning materials for the device, which would meet the needs of students and educators.

Bringing the Tuto to schools: Steps and Challenges

While many customers can be stringent with their product requirements, Luminum InfoTek empowered the Lumium team to stay flexible with the eReader components, allowing us to experiment with different strategies and designs that would best fit the target demographic while including basic tablet functionality (Wi-Fi, audio speakers, and Bluetooth connectivity). Our overarching principles were reliability, durability, patentability, time-to-market and cost.

We needed a platform we could modify over time as student, teacher and syllabus requirements changed, but we also needed to build a closed control program to run on top of the device OS. This was important not just to protect the integrity of the content and capabilities but also so Luminium InfoTek could offer customized branding and custom-control for individual user password access, for each school offering the Tuto to students.

User Research

In total we spoke with 500 students in grades 9-11 in Ahmedabad, India. The students and teachers researched came from diverse economic and social backgrounds. Given the diversity of India, in terms of religion, culture, language and economic means, we were able to gather a good range of emotions from all users. The influencing factors for each group impacted what they saw as the primary need for this device. Their exposure to and actual use of small, smart digital devices varied, as did familiarity of such devices by the teachers who also needed to understand and interface with the Tuto device.

Students interact with a Foam Prototype

Lumium’s engineers and designers traveled with and observed students throughout the entire school day—from their homes, to school, to their after-school coaching classes and back home in the evening. We were looking for patterns in the way students approached their daily learning; everything from studying for exams to assignment execution, personal organization and methods for planning ahead. What times do students typically sit down to study (if at all)? How long do students stay working on a particular assignment until they move to the next one? What is the preferred method of learning for each student?

Once we had the human and technological demands in mind, we began sketching, building off a basic underlay of hardware framework provided by our engineers. Because the client was flexible when it came to certain aspects of their hardware; for example, there were no strict requirements for LCD screen size, we had the ability to pivot to alternate designs based on peoples’ reaction to several rounds of sketches and detailed renderings.

To determine which model was most aesthetically pleasing and functional we took handcrafted foam prototypes of our top 5 device designs out to a number of middle schools. Not surprisingly perhaps, students wanted the largest screen size possible. Thus, our engineers went with a slide-screen design with a tucked away keyboard concealed underneath.

Six foam prototypes

With our hardware designers working on the look and feel of the eReader, our software engineers worked on the graphical user interface (GUI) that is customized around modern e Learning practices. The student can browse any chapter and page like any other e-book and for that the UI follows a typical structure. But, studying against plain reading is a non-linear activity; and our UI centric research showed that students often go to the portions they have highlighted in the text, they often go to the last-read page, they often go directly to the Q&A section or to the problems and solutions, and they have timetables of school and their own schedule for studying. The features that facilitate the above are all placed for immediate access at any time while browsing.

Reflecting this work and studying behavior, the device has touch pads on right and left side of the screen, which when tapped, will allow immediate access to Q&A, highlighted portions, animations, schedules. This eliminates the need for the student to go to the main menu repeatedly in order to access the data in various scenarios.

Click for full-sized image.

Not only can students create their own task lists; the Tuto is also designed to assist in creating to-do lists based on the student’s progress with the embedded coursework. Once they finish their required reading on the device for the day, Tuto will sound an alarm prompting them to take action on corresponding assignments and homework. In effect, each student would get a personalized plan for studying and completing assignments in a timely fashion The schedule function built in the UI also allows parents to set study reminders for their children, taking the screen to the chapter and page that is scheduled to be studied at that time.

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Launched in 1994, Icebreaker was the first company in the world to develop a merino wool layering system for the outdoors. It was also the first outdoor apparel company in the world to source merino directly from growers, a system it began in 1997. Icebreaker merino clothing for the outdoors, technical sports and lifestyle includes underwear, mid layer garments, outerwear, socks and accessories for men, women and children. Icebreaker is based in Wellington, New Zealand, and is sold in more than 3000 stores in 43 countries.

You have to be tough to survive in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. With scorching summers and freezing winters, the glacier-carved mountain range is a harsh, inaccessible environment—and possibly the last place you’d expect to find a sheep.

But the sheep that survive on the Southern Alps aren’t run-of-the mill lowland sheep. They’re merino sheep: hardy alpine animals with a coat that insulated in summer, breathes in summer, and is exceptionally soft and lightweight.

In 1994, Icebreaker‘s founder, Jeremy Moon was given a prototype t-shirt made from merino wool. It was soft, sensual and lustrous—nothing like the itchy, scratchy wool he’d grown up with. It was also machine washable, easy care and naturally resistant to odor.

The discovery inspired Jeremy to create an entirely new category around this new product: merino outdoor apparel. Icebreaker merino garments and accessories for the outdoors, technical sports and lifestyle are now sold in more than 3000 stores in 43 countries.

From Microns to Marathons

My introduction to the brand came in 1994, when Jeremy sponsored my adventure racing team. To be honest, I was skeptical—the stuff he gave us looked far too nice to race in.

After a couple of days of non-stop running, cycling and hiking, the river started rising. People were being rescued by helicopter. My team was the first out, and when we crossed the river there were TV crews waiting to interview us.

By the time I got to the transition point, I was so cold in my polypropylene layers that I was on the verge of hypothermia. I had my doubts about Icebreaker merino, but they were my only dry clothes so I decided to give them a try.

What immediately struck me was the warmth. Icebreaker merino is warm when wet, so I stayed warm even though the rain was still falling.

Adventure races are all about survival—you have to stay warm, keep your nutrition up, and protect your feet from blisters. After that, it’s a mental game. I told everyone in my team how warm I was, so by the time the race ended two days later all of us were wearing our Icebreaker layers. We’d been converted.

Creating a New Icebreaker

Before we can even start designing a new garment, we think about the person who is going to use it. We think about think about whether the garment will be a base layer, a mid layer or an outer layer, and what activity it’s going to be used for. This exploration helps us formulate the necessary properties for the yarn, the fabric and, finally, the garment itself.

We write a brief with specifications for the type of yarn we’ll need, and that influences our sourcing. Merino fibers are ultra fine—much finer than the fibers of traditional wool—which is why our merino is so soft and non-itch. It’s very lightweight and feels more like silk against the skin than wool.

Merino fibers usually range from 13–25 microns, which is about one-third the thickness of a human hair. The smaller the micron, the finer the wool (in comparison, wool fibers from traditional lowland sheep are usually 35–45 microns).

Once we’ve decided on the type of yarn, we brief on what sort of fabric we need to construct. For example, it could be a lightweight garment made of eyelet fabric for running, or one of our Realfleece brushed fleece mid layers for wearing outdoors in cold weather.

Finally, we do a briefing on the garment itself. This is when we talk about potential enhancements to the garment, such as increased freedom of motion or laminations to make a garment windproof and rainproof. We’ll think about what season it’s likely to be worn in.

Icebreaker is a layering system, so we’ll ask ourselves how every new garment will work when it’s worn with other Icebreaker layers.

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While trying to find where to watch my beloved Pats last season after relocating to the West Coast I found the 506, a site that curates interactive Google maps of TV markets for various American sports. I rediscovered the site earlier this week via kottke and took another look.

However practical these maps may be in helping you navigate television on Sundays, they are concurrently acute cultural and possibly even ethnic cartographies.

Looking closely at a few regions for this upcoming week’s FOX games you can begin to see the method and design that goes into promoting specific teams to particularly loyal or interested regions:

The Mid Atlantic, where most local teams are playing on CBS this week is a jigsaw puzzle. The Dallas-San Francisco match up is being aired in New York City & Philadelphia, possibly a nod to the camaraderie between SF and NYC or maybe a holdover from Dallas’ bygone reputation as “America’s Team.” Meanwhile, a little further south, the local Washington Redskins are barely penetrating the Mason-Dixon line, a potential reminder that Washington is a Southern city.

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