AAU TO GO
The new canteen service
Service Design
September – November 2022
My Role
The Problem Area
The Aalborg University canteen in Copenhagen has fixed operating hours and offers meals only during lunchtime. However, the university is accessible twenty-four hours a day, and quite often, students experience a lack of meals when it’s not lunchtime. As designers, we faced the challenge of tackling this problem by mapping the existing service, understanding the currently needs of the students and providing a service system solution.
How to ensure that students have access to
ready-made meals beyond lunchtime?
The Concept
AAU TO GO is a new service built upon of the existing canteen service. The innovative service system addresses students’ needs for affordable and accessible meal options outside of the canteen opening hours. At the same time, it upholds the core values of the canteen provider – sustainability and reduction of food waste – by selling the lunch leftover throughout the day in an easy and convenient system that enables the canteen to be closed.
AAU TO GO offers a flexible pick-up time for ready meals after the canteen closing hour. Students can pre-order their meals through the AAU TO GO app, and these meals will be placed in a smart fridge. To retrieve their orders, it’s only needed to scan the QR code. This way a seamless and convenient experience is secured.
A Sneak-Peek of the Design Process
The design process was tackled by embracing a multilevel product service system tools, where I had the possibility to navigate between abstract and conceptual ideas and logical and complex architectures of the service. Navigating through the service concept, service system and service encounter levels allowed me to…
… have a deeper understanding and empathy with the canteen’s users and their daily meal experiences in relation to food:
... and an holistic understanding of the canteen service system:
... create a new service system and describe each service interaction that could provide meaningful experiences to the users:
