Helping restaurant owners manage grease before it becomes a city problem
Helping the City of Lansing reduce sewer damage from restaurant grease by designing for the people the current system wasn't reaching.
The 90-second version
Fats, oils, and grease (FOG) from commercial kitchens caused 47% of Lansing's sanitary sewer blockages in 2021, resulting in property damage, public health risk, and real cost to the city. The City of Lansing's Public Service Department brought me on to understand why, and to design a sustainable way to reduce it.
I led research and design across a 7-month engagement: a team-based discovery phase in summer 2022, followed by an individual project translating findings into a working prototype that fall.
I was the project lead for the summer research phase (a team project) and the sole researcher and designer for the fall prototyping phase, which built directly on that research. Across both phases, I owned the research design, field recruiting, synthesis, and the resulting prototype.
Why restaurant owners weren't complying, and what the city could actually do about it.
Our primary users, restaurant and food truck owners, were busy, hard to reach, and had little natural interest in a research study about grease traps. Rather than relying on recruiting emails or scheduled interviews that weren't landing, I went directly to where people already were: restaurants, food trucks, festivals, and farmers' markets, using short, informal conversations to learn about their FOG habits in their actual working environment.
This fieldwork was paired with more structured research: 15 stakeholder interviews (city staff, plumbing inspectors, treatment plant operators), 5 user interviews, 211 surveys, and 12 comparative evaluations of other cities' FOG programs.
The guiding question: How might we make FOG management easier for restaurant owners, without adding more burden to an already-stretched city staff?
Two connected pieces of work came out of the research:
A citizen-facing framework addressing the systemic gaps: clearer ordinances, public recycling and disposal options, outreach and education, and a central source of information for both residents and businesses.
Built in the fall phase, this tool gave restaurant owners a centralized way to manage their own compliance:
The research and prototype were presented to the City of Lansing's Public Service Department. Following the presentation, I was invited to a follow-up meeting with the department's Sustainability Manager and department head to discuss the FOG resolution framework in more depth, where I was told several of the recommendations were planned for implementation, though the specific scope and timeline weren't shared with me directly.
More broadly, the project opened a concrete conversation about how UX and service design can work inside local government (a space that rarely has design resources at all) and created a bridge between the city and outside expertise it wouldn't otherwise have easy access to.
One thing this project taught me pretty quickly was that research doesn't always happen under ideal conditions. People were busy, the team was small, and I couldn't exactly wait around for participants to come to me. So I went to where they already were. It was a simple shift, but one that made the research much more grounded in how people actually experienced the service.
There's always more to the story.
Curious about the research, decisions, or what happened behind the scenes? I'd love to chat.
