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.

1. Design for Public Health
principles for an emerging discipline
Greater Good Studio
December 2013

2. 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.
Greater Good Studio
http://www.rwjf.org/en/blogs/culture-of-health/2013/10/leveraging_the_power.html
December 2013

3. CHALLENGE
Design a public school cafeteria
that encourages healthy eating
Greater Good Studio
December 2013

4. 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.
October 2013

5. 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 timelapse photography of the entire space.
Greater Good Studio

6. 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.
October 2013

7. 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.
Greater Good Studio

8. 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.
October 2013

9. 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.
Greater Good Studio

10. 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.
October 2013

11. 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.
Greater Good Studio

12. Project Roadmap
The eight principles can be demonstrated across each step of the design process.
FRAMING
RESEARCH
SYNTHESIS
Don’t know the
answer until you
know the question.
BRAINSTORMING
Articulate the
user journey.
Understand an
experience from
multiple angles.
PROTOTYPING
ROLLOUT
Design for
every last barrier.
Ask what you can
make and measure.
Impact first,
scale second.
Talk about
the solution.
Engage users in the entire process.
Greater Good Studio
December 2013

13. Design for Public Health
we look forward to growing this field with you
Greater Good Studio
December 2013