For decades schools have put in efforts to provide students with healthier meals by engaging nutritionists and experts to reconfigure their lunch menus and then find ways to enforce consumption amongst students. In spring 2013, a San Francisco based school district began a 5 month collaboration with the design Firm IDEO to explore why most of the students still do not readily consume the healthy lunch provided by the school.IDEO adopted a refreshing “human centered” approach to this wide scale challenge by putting the students (the users) at the heart of the redesign process. Research was extended to include all stakeholders beyond just students: food service staff, parents, nutrition staff, parents, administrators and community partners. They used prototyping as well as placed cellphones on every lunch table with an application that captured vast feedback from the users. By interacting with students and exploring their holistic needs, IDEO discovered that students are more focused on how they eat lunch, opposed to what they eat. The environment, the company and the service impacts their lunch choices. Traditionally, most schools would redesign lunch offerings to make them healthier and now as a result of deeper insights they were able to shift focus to the entire “Lunch Experience”. The redesign incorporated separate dining environments and formats for different age groups that catered to the social and emotional needs of students. In the end students felt a sense of ownership and parents and schools felt better to see results without having to force the children through strict rules and constraints.
Source: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/16/rethinking-school-lunch/?_r=1