Summary

As a design leader, I drive innovation by bringing together diverse stakeholders, aligning competing priorities, and transforming research insights into practical, scalable solutions. In March 2018, I co-led a multi-stakeholder design sprint to tackle the challenge of improving the school lunch experience for students at San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).

This sprint brought together SFUSD Student Nutrition Services (SNS), school administrators, designers from leading companies (SAP, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Stanford Legal Design Lab, YouTube), and a senior class at Mission High School. Over five days, we combined participatory design with design sprint methodologies to develop actionable concepts for enhancing students' access to and perception of school meals.

The project serves as a case study in human-centered innovation within complex systems, demonstrating how strategic design can align diverse stakeholders, integrate student voices, and generate real-world improvements in school food services.

Project Overview

The Challenge: Making School Lunch Work for Students
School meal programs are a critical lifeline for students, but outdated perceptions, inefficient service models, and uninviting cafeteria environments often prevent students from taking advantage of these programs. Our challenge was to redesign students’ access to food—focusing not only on meal availability but also on perceptions, usability, and experience.

Our design sprint aimed to:

Identify key barriers preventing students from utilizing school meal programs.
Prototype solutions that could improve access, engagement, and perception of school lunch.
Deliver actionable concepts that SNS and SFUSD could implement.

To maximize real-world impact, we designed our sprint to include students as co-designers, ensuring that any solutions reflected their lived experiences and needs.

Key Challenges & Design Approach

Navigating a Complex System with Many Stakeholders

Redesigning school food systems required balancing the needs of:

Students, who often avoided cafeteria meals due to stigma or poor experience.
SFUSD Nutrition Services, who needed feasible, scalable solutions.
School Administrators, who had operational and policy constraints.

Bridging Policy and Design Thinking

We needed a structured yet flexible approach that allowed for deep exploration of user needs while staying grounded in policy realities. Our hybrid design sprint methodology blended:

Participatory design to engage students and stakeholders.
Service design thinking to uncover operational pain points.
Rapid prototyping to generate tangible, testable interventions.

By incorporating diverse perspectives, we ensured that our concepts were not just innovative, but also actionable and scalable.

Sprint Execution & Key Insights

Day 1: Immersion & Problem Definition

We embedded ourselves in the school lunch experience—observing cafeteria dynamics, interviewing students and staff, and experiencing the lunch process firsthand.

🔹 Mission High School Reality: The cafeteria was underutilized, perceived as unappealing, and confusing to navigate. Many students opted out of school lunch entirely.
🔹 Marina Middle School Contrast: A redesigned lunchroom with colorful graphics, improved seating, and structured meal service showed the potential for environmental design to shift perceptions and behaviors.

This contrast helped us define clear opportunity areas:
✔ Improving cafeteria design and meal presentation.
✔ Reducing complexity in the lunch selection process.
✔ Enhancing student agency in meal choices.

Day 2-3: Ideation & Concept Development

With these insights, we ran collaborative design sessions, bringing students and SNS staff together to brainstorm new models for school meal engagement.

Key design principles emerged:
✔ Abundance & Choice – Creating an experience where students felt they had attractive, diverse meal options.
✔ Agency & Empowerment – Giving students more control over how and when they accessed food.
✔ Appeal & Social Experience – Redesigning the cafeteria as a desirable place to eat and gather.

Concepts included:

A digital pre-ordering system to let students customize and reserve meals.
Vending machine-style grab-and-go meals for faster, stigma-free access.
A cafeteria redesign playbook focusing on colors, layouts, and service models to create a more welcoming space.

Day 4-5: Prototyping & Validation

Students actively participated in testing early-stage prototypes, providing real-time feedback on feasibility, desirability, and usability.

🔹 Key Takeaway: Small, strategic interventions could shift perceptions. For example, making meal options more visible and using more appealing packaging increased interest in cafeteria meals.

Impact & Business Value

🔹 Shaping Future Policy & Implementation
SFUSD and SNS integrated key sprint takeaways into their long-term strategy for meal program redesign.

🔹 Multi-Stakeholder Alignment
By facilitating collaboration between designers, school administrators, and students, the sprint created a shared vision for improving student nutrition.

🔹 Scalable Solutions for School Districts
The insights and prototypes served as a blueprint for broader implementation across other schools and districts, demonstrating how design-led approaches can drive meaningful change in public systems.

Takeaways

This design sprint exemplifies how strategic design can transform complex, multi-stakeholder challenges into actionable, real-world solutions.

✔ Co-Design is Essential – Engaging students as active participants ensured that solutions were meaningful and usable.
✔ Small Design Shifts Have Big Impact – Subtle changes in meal presentation and service flow significantly influenced engagement.
✔ Cross-Sector Collaboration Drives Innovation – Bridging policy, operations, and design thinking created solutions that were not just creative, but also feasible and scalable.

This project reflects my ability to lead multi-stakeholder innovation efforts, align diverse perspectives, and drive practical, high-impact design solutions within complex systems like public education and food services.

Want to learn more? Read the full case study on SAP Design's Medium Publication.

SF School Lunch Design Sprint