cultural activities
15
finnish cultural foundation
annual report 2012–2013
Better-served school meals
I
n the project run by the City of Van-
taa and Vantaan Tilapalvelut Oy, the
design team went out into a school to
improve the serving of its school meals to-
gether with pupils and teachers.
Marjaana Ponkala,
Vantaan Tilapalvelut Vantti Oy
“The school meals have been better served
inmany ways since the Designed Solutions
pilot projected ended at the Martinlaakso
school. The lunch hour has been extend-
ed, the furniture has been moved round,
the queuing has been better channelled by
means of lines taped to the floor and more
signs have been put up. The kitchen staff –
their names and faces – are nowmore vis-
ible, there’s music in the dining room, and
there are temporary exhibitions of pupils’
art on the walls.
“The school is particularly pleased that
some of the older pupils who used not to
eat anything at all are now having school
meals. Nowadays theymay even help them-
selves to bread and milk, if nothing else.
“The idea was for us to continue devel-
oping our school meals in Vantaa indepen-
dently, drawing on the results of the pilot
project. Muotohiomo made up a manual of
the pilot practices and the resulting ideas
and this has been marketed to schools in
conjunction with things like an eco-com-
petition on the theme of food. The compe-
tition ends in spring 2014, and then we’ll
see whether schools are keen to follow
the manual or whether they’ve used it to
think up something new.”
Pekka Toivanen,
Muotohiomo
“Much of service design is listening. When
you ask people what they want, they apply
themselves in a completely different way.
“In this project, too, a greater achieve-
ment even than the concrete changes in
the dining room was the shift in attitude
generated by the shared design process.
If you can get the pupils and teachers in-
terested in their school meals, they will
be more prepared to make an effort on
their behalf. So the fact that things have
happened in the school dining room now
that our part in the project is over is a good
sign. And this is how it should be: you can’t
halt a service like school meals and over-
haul it in one fell swoop; the changes have
to be gradual.
“The fact that the observations made at
the pilot school will probably be drawn on
right at the planning stage for new schools
is another good result.
“The Designed Solutions programme
was important for our sector, because
it gave us some concrete examples and
results for improving public services by
means of service design. It was also re-
warding for our agency; after all, design-
ing a municipal service for children is far
more meaningful than designing, say, cof-
fee cups – which we’ve also done. You al-
ways learn something from every project,
but this one left us with a strong desire to
do more like it.”
