About this guide

The School Meals Design Guide features activities and tools to center the needs and wants of students, caregivers, and the school community in meal programs.

The Guide brings the principles and tools of human-centered design into the school food context.

It was created by No Kid Hungry’s Center for Best Practices with input from IDEO and an Innovation Cohort of food and nutrition directors and other design and school food experts from across the country.   

Why is human-centered design important?

Human-centered design is a creative problem-solving process that centers the needs, preferences, and challenges of real people in the design of products, services and programs.

When students are engaged in school meal meal design, they are more likely to feel like they belong and find options that reflect their desires. By supporting children with a healthy meal, we are not only improving their odds for success in school, but we are ensuring they are nourished during the school day, which will improve health outcomes in the long term. This is why developing a student-centered approach informed by human-centered design is so important.

What is the role of food and nutrition services?

School food and nutrition teams are always innovating.  You serve meals to hundreds or thousands of people in programs you built, operate, and improve.  You manage staff and budgets, come up with new meals and recipes, create an inviting cafeteria space, and ensure everything operates efficiently.  Not to mention juggling staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions.

You observe what is happening in your cafeterias and hear what students, caregivers, and team members have to say. You come up with ways to respond, do small tests, and roll out good ideas across your district.  

This is very similar to the human-centered design process.  Incorporating some of the tools of human-centered design in your work can help you do what you are already doing more systematically and uncover new ideas for your program.

This website was created to save you time by giving you easy-to-use human-centered design tools tailored to the school food context. Use these tools to inspire more student- and community-centered innovations in your school meal program. 

Shannon Solomon, Aurora Public Schools

FAQs

How is this guide laid out?

  • ·From the Home or All Resources pages, select the stakeholder group you are most interested in engaging – Students, Caregivers, or Community Members (note to design, probably makes sense to link these)

    • Each of these stakeholder pages contain design tools we’ve selected and customized for each. These are intended to be ready-to-go and can be used on their own to get a quick sense of opinions or as part of a full design process.

  • Or select Human-Centered Design 101 to explore some basic tools in the design process if you are interested in following a more structured approach

    • We have selected a few key tools that will help you understand needs and perspectives of your stakeholder groups, create potential ideas in response, and try them out to see what works and what doesn’t.

 What is included in this guide?

  • Ready-to-use tools to center students and communities in school meal programs

  • These tools include instructions, suggested use, and in most cases, an asset that can be downloaded, modified, and used. See instructions for how to download these tools

  • Assets can be a checklist for student interviews, a presentation template for conversations with administrators, smiley face tokens, and so on

Can I use a tool from one stakeholder group for another?

  • Yes, most of these tools can be adapted for different audiences. For instance, if you see something you like in Activating Students that you think you’d like to use with parents, go for it.   

Are there more tools for design?

  • Absolutely. We wanted to be selective in this guide to make it more relevant for busy school food and nutrition directors. But for those who want to dive deeper here are a few important resources:

    • IDEO’s School Retool Project

    • Liberatory design

    • Equity-based Community Design

    • FoodCorps’ Our Cafeteria Project

What should I do if I have an idea for a tool or have already been using something that works really well?

  • Please let us know! We are always on the lookout for new, creative ways to make it easier for food and nutrition teams to make their programs more student-centered.

What should I do if something doesn’t work?

  • That’s ok. This is all about experimentation so if it doesn’t work – try something different. If you have a few moments to spare to tell us about your experience, please write us so that we can continue to strengthen this guide for the school food and nutrition community

 

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