Greater Good Studio December 2013

Design for Public Healthprinciples for an emerging discipline

December 2013Greater Good Studio

Public health must develop a capacity for design thinking. There is both a growing need and opportunity to build collaboration between public health and the design community to address the critical health issues of our time. Public health interventions, particularly to address complex problems, must become more human-centered, providing environments and experiences that make healthy behaviors easy, enjoyable, and economical parts of everyday life. !This document provides a case study from a Greater Good Studio project that can form the basis of a new discipline: design for public health. Eight principles bring design thinking practices to life through tangible examples.

http://www.rwjf.org/en/blogs/culture-of-health/2013/10/leveraging_the_power.html

December 2013Greater Good Studio

Design a public school cafeteria that encourages healthy eating

CHALLENGE

October 2013

PRINCIPLE 1 !

Don’t know the answer until you know the question.

!We should never decide what to fix, until we truly understand what is broken. Our initial hypothesis was that healthy school lunch was defined by the food itself. But after observing behavior in the cafeteria, we noticed the biggest gap was that kids simply weren’t eating all their food, no matter how healthy it was. We reframed the project around encouraging healthy eating behavior.

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PRINCIPLE 2 !Understand an experience from multiple angles. !Because experiences happen across both space and time, design research should be both broad and deep. We interviewed school stakeholders (from founder to janitor), shadowed lunchroom staff, talked with families in their homes, put “headcams” on kids to literally see lunch from their point of view, volunteered as Lunch Room Attendants, and took time-lapse photography of the entire space.

October 2013

PRINCIPLE 3 !Articulate the user journey. !Any compelling experience has 5 stages: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit and Extend. Isolating these moments helps us find patterns in qualitative data. We defined the cafeteria journey from looking at the menu on my fridge, to standing in the lunch line, to eating at the tables, cleaning up, and talking about the meal at home that night. The journey reminds us that it’s a cafeteria, but it’s also a food relationship. It doesn’t start when kids enter or end when they leave.

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PRINCIPLE 4 !Talk about the solution. !The social sector is plagued by talking about the problem. Instead, social designers frame opportunities around what to amplify, not what to fix. Rather than aiming to “decrease food waste,” we set goals to increase time for food choice, increase trial of new food, and increase kids’ focus on food. These opportunities generated hundreds of ideas around food presentation and service, and catalyzed the community around the ideal end state.

October 2013

PRINCIPLE 5 !Ask what you can make and measure. !Designers are trained to make solutions tangible. But where design has a new role to play is in creating user-centered metrics to measure impact. We designed and prototyped a new process where students are served their food in courses. Feedback from kids and staff was positive. But the most important finding, which we measured carefully, was that kids ate more balanced meals, spreading their appetite across the four dishes. This new metric provides a new way to measure success.

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PRINCIPLE 6 !Design for every last barrier. !The simple reason social problems aren’t solved is that there are barriers in place. We should seek out and uncover every last barrier, and not stop until they’ve all been addressed. Our bowls and trays might help kids eat more balanced meals, but if their larger size adds 30 minutes of dishwashing time onto someone’s job (as they initially did), this small issue would prevent the entire system from being adopted. Needless to say, we redesigned the parts to fit better in the dishwasher.

October 2013

PRINCIPLE 7 !Engage users in the entire process. !Since communities are the ones ultimately using our solutions, it’s important to engage them at every step. School teachers, staff, parents and students were not only our end users, but also our partners in the design process. We studied their needs and assets, brainstormed ideas alongside them, and solicited their feedback on every prototype. This is because adoption hinges critically upon their buy-in.

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PRINCIPLE 8 !Impact first, scale second. !If we haven’t created social impact in one context, then attempting to scale becomes the cart before the horse. Our project focused first on impact at one school, and many of our concepts are so customized to this environment that they may not scale well (such as an interactive world map depicting the sources of raw ingredients). Now, in Phase 2, we are exploring scale by translating our concepts to new schools, and creating a toolkit based on common factors.

December 2013Greater Good Studio

Project Roadmap The eight principles can be demonstrated across each step of the design process.

BRAINSTORMING PROTOTYPING ROLLOUTFRAMING RESEARCH SYNTHESIS

Don’t know the answer until you

know the question.

Understand an experience from multiple angles.

Articulate the user journey.

Talk about the solution.

Ask what you can make and measure.

Design for every last barrier.

Engage users in the entire process.

Impact first, scale second.

Greater Good Studio December 2013

Design for Public Healthwe look forward to growing this field with you