More Design Resources
This guide is full of methods and tools that will help you and your school teams make positive changes in your school meal programs, to create more joy, participation, and healthy eating for your students.
Below you’ll find the definition of methods and tools, some guidance on your role as a Food Nutrition Director in interacting with these resources, and the full gallery of all the content on the site.
Tools
With so much on your plate, as an FNS Director you need actionable solutions you can implement quickly. These tools are inspired by real world solutions directors have implemented and are ways of putting the methods of Human-Centered Design into practice in actionable ways.
These tools were designed as actionable experiments you, the Food Nutrition Director, can introduce to set the tone for collaboration among staff and students. Each tool contains a downloadable resource and a clear outline for how best to integrate the tool within your student meal program design process. Use the tools below to better understand the population you serve, invite student involvement, and generate innovative solutions that bring increased joy and community to the shared meal experience.
-
Student Sourced Feedback Loops
Work with students to gather authentic opinions and involve them in the school meal process.
-
Digital Student Feedback
Get creative with digital surveys to help students overcome hesitation toward sharing honest feedback.
-
Culturally Relevant Meal Inspiration
Introduce culturally diverse meals to encourage a sense of inclusion and belonging.
-
Crowdsourcing Top Trends
Invite students to share top of mind trends in order to keep your meal program feeling fresh.
-
Plug + Play School Meal Brand
Add branded elements to program touch points to help students see the food in a new light.
-
Designing Uncommon Measures
Identify metrics for success that consider the deeper impact you can have on the student meal experience.
Basic Methods
These are the practices that will help you bring the creative problem solving process known as human-centered design to your work as a Food Nutrition Director.
Human-centered design is a way of working that will support you and your teams in connecting with students to understand what they need and care about trying out small things to learn quickly, and bringing creativity to imagine fresh ideas – all in service of creating better school meal experiences.
Why student-centered design?
Methods are the skills and ways of working with your collaborators will need to be most successful in running those experiments.
These are the skills you will be building the more you experiment, learn, and try again.
What’s your role as a Food Nutrition Director?
None of us can do [human-centered design] alone. It’s a team sport. It’s how we work together to learn quickly, come up with new ideas, and listen deeply to those we are trying to serve.
These resources are meant for you to bring to the teams you work with. At first, you might be leading these activities and experiments. Over time, ideally your teams take over running these methods, taking ownership over using the human-centered design process in their work.
Phases of Student-Centered Design
Gain insight into the student experience and look beyond the cafeteria for inspiration.
Come up with innovative new ideas and build, learn, and iterate towards impact.
Identify and share successes and learnings to generate momentum and resources.
