Artefact

Perspectives

Designing the Future with AI

A mini-series unpacking AI and discussing our role in its implementation

Artefact’s staff reflects on AI’s potential impact on individuals and society by answering questions prompted by the Tarot Cards of Tech. Each section contains videos that explores a tarot card and provides our perspectives and provocations.

The Tarot Cards of Tech was created to help innovators think deeply about scenarios around scale, disruption, usage, equity, and access.  With the recent developments and democratization of AI, we revisited these cards to imagine a better tech future that accounts for unintended consequences and our values we hold as a society.

Cultural implications for youth

Jeff Turkelson, Senior Strategy Director

Transcript: I love that this card starts to get at, maybe some of the less quantifiable, but still really important facets of life. So, when it comes to something like self-driving cars, which generative AI is actually really helping to enable, of course people think about how AI can replace the professional driver, or how AI is generally coming for all of our jobs.

But there are so many other interesting implications. So for example, if you no longer need to drive your car, would you then ever need to get a license to drive? And if we do away with needing a license to drive, then what does that mean for that moment in time where you turn 16 years old and you get newfound independence with your drivers license? If that disappears, that could really change what it means to become a teenager and become a young adults, etc. So what other events or rituals would AI disrupt for young adults as they grow older?

Value and vision led design

Piyali Sircar, Lead Researcher

Transcript: This invitation to think about the impact of incorporating gen AI into our products is really an opportunity to think about design differently. We should be asking ourselves, “What is our vision for the futures we could build?” and once we define those, the next question is, “Does gen AI have a role to play in enabling these futures?” Because the answer may be “no”, and that should be okay if we’re truly invested in our vision. And if the answer is “yes”, then we need to try to anticipate the cultural implications of introducing gen AI into our domain space. For example, “How will this shift the way people spend time? How will it change the way they interact with another? What do they care about? What does this product say about society as a whole?” Just a few questions to think about.

Introducing positive friction

Chad Hall, Senior Design Director

Transcript: The ‘Big Bad Wolf’ card reminds me to consider not only which AI product features are vulnerable to manipulation, but also who the bad actors might be. Those bad actors could be a user, it could be us, our teams, or even future teams. So, for example, while your product might not misuse data now, a future feature could exploit it.

A recent example that comes to mind is two students who added facial recognition software to AI glasses with a built-in camera. They were able to easily dox the identities of just about anyone they came across in their daily life.

I think product teams need to introduce just enough positive friction in their workflows to pause and consider impacts. Generative AI is only going to ask for more access to our personal data to help with more complex tasks. So the reality is, if nobody tries to ask the question, the questions are never going to get asked.

Minimizing harm in AI

Neeti Sanyal, VP Creative

Transcript: I think it’s important to ask whether AI could be a bad actor? Even when you’re not trying to produce misinformation with generative AI, in some ways it is inherently doing that. I am concerned about the potential for generative AI to cause harm in a field that has low tolerance for risk, things like health care or finance. An example that comes to mind is a conversational bot that can give the wrong mental health advice to someone that is experiencing a moment of crisis.

One exciting way that companies are addressing this is by building a tech stack that uses both generative and traditional AI. And it’s the combination of these techniques that help minimize the chance of hallucinations and can create outputs are much more predictable.

If we are thoughtful in how the AI is constructed in the first place, we can help prevent AI from being the bad actor.

Building job security

Rachael Cicero, Associate Design Director

Transcript: One thing we keep hearing about is the disappearing workforce, but often I think we’re overlooking the fact that humans will continue to exist in and contribute to society. Instead, I’d like to see a shift the conversation from the disappearing workforce to the unique contributions of human and AI collaboration. Consider civic technology, where generative AI can be used for things like supporting the process of unemployment applications. AI can help with document recognition, which can really reduce the load on human staff, and also accelerate response time for applicants. To me, that collaboration isn’t about replacing jobs but really about enhancing them.

The key to that is investing in reskilling. By including the perspectives of people affected in the design of AI systems, we can better understand the tasks they want automated. The goal being to create a future where AI and humans can work together, enhancing each other’s strengths, and ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to thrive in a pretty evolving job market.

Transforming tradition

Max West, Principal Designer

Transcript: This card reminds me of how cable TV technology reshaped media jobs. Remember Video Jockeys on the popular 90s MTV show, Total Request Live? VJs had evolved from selecting and remixing music, like their traditional radio counterparts, to focusing on engaging with crowds, talking to celebrities, and orchestrating pop cultural moments. 

Now take the cable TV example and apply it to AI transforming an industry like education. Teacher’s jobs could similarly shift to a more social focus. An AI-powered app could tailor a math or science lesson to a student’s unique cognitive abilities, while the teacher can focus more on the physical, interpersonal, and social aspects of learning. In the same way that VJs would provide crowd-pleasing moments between music videos, educators might find themselves in a similar “hosting” role for the classroom.   


So it’s less about what disappears and more about what can transform. So, while roles may change with AI, it could create time and space for richer, more personal experiences among groups.

Discover Tarot Cards of Tech

Perspectives

How Web3 can support adolescent well-being

A vector illustration depicting a person venturing towards a Web3 landscape
Jaspal Sandhu, Hopelab
Jaspal Sandhu, Hopelab
Neeti Sanyal
Neeti Sanyal

“…you don’t even have to connect to a person in real life, but you still feel connected.”

– Laya, 15 year old NFT Artist

Developing Skills and Earning a Livelihood

Whether it’s NFTs, Web3 or AI, the rapid evolution of technology can offer opportunities for users of all ages, but young people – who spend so much of their time online – have a unique relationship with these emerging tools. And, despite what many think, adolescents are already using these emerging technologies to improve their well-being at a time where the mere existence and lived experiences of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth, especially, are under attack.

Take 13-year-old digital artist Laya Mathikshara from Chennai, India, for example. In May 2021, as a neophyte in the world of digital art, she sold her first NFT.

Her animated artwork titled What if, Moon had life? depicted an active core of the Moon gurgling. Inspired by the distance between the Earth and the Moon (384,400 km), Laya listed the reserve price as 0.384400 ETH (Ethereum) on Foundation, a platform that enables creators to monetize their work using blockchain technology. It caught the eye of Melvin, co-founder of the NFT Malayali Community, who placed a bid and collected her first artwork for 0.39 ETH ($1,572 at the time).

After the sale, and the success of subsequent NFTs, Laya – now 15 years old – decided to make digital art her career. With Web3, a collector of her art introduced her to other artists, who she felt inspired to support through Ethereum donations. It “feels amazing to help people and contribute. The feeling is awesome,” she says.

“I started with nothing to be honest,” says Laya, “with zero knowledge about digital art itself. So I learned digital art [in parallel to] NFTs because I had been into traditional art [when I was younger].”

Supporting Key Developmental Assets to Wellbeing

Knowing that young people spend much of their unstructured time online, that digital wellness is a distinct concern for Gen Z, and that the technology landscape is rapidly changing, Artefact partnered with Hopelab to conduct an exploratory study to understand their experiences with emerging technology platforms – ones largely enabled by Web3 technologies like blockchain, smart contracts, and DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). The organizations were particularly interested in how these technologies might contribute to a wide spectrum of developmental assets to improve the well-being of young people.

Our study found that Web3 can support youth wellness because it is built on values such as ownership, validation, and community that link to developmental assets like agency and belonging. These values are fundamentally different from the values of Web 2, a technology operating on business models that monetize our attention and personal data.

Awareness and usage of Web3 technologies is already high among Gen Zers, with 55% in the U.S. claiming to understand the concept of Web3. Twenty-nine percent have owned or traded a cryptocurrency and 22% have owned or traded an NFT. Importantly, Gen Z believes these technologies are more than a fad: 62% are confident that DAOs will improve how companies are run in the future.

Having grown up with multiple compounding stressors including climate change, a global pandemic, and political unrest, some Gen Z find appeal in Web3’s potential to create what you want, own what you make, support yourself, and change the world.

With Web3, young people are experimenting with their interests and identities, creating art and music, accumulating wealth, consuming and sharing opinions, forming communities, and supporting causes that deeply resonate with them.

Victor Langlois and LATASHÁ, visual and musical artists, respectively, each represent the diversity that is important to our organizations, and have made real income at a young age through NFTs. Likewise, World of Women, a community of creators and collectors believe representation and inclusion should be built into the foundation of Web3, while UkraineDAO seeks to raise money to support Ukraine.

Aligning with GenZ Values

The gateway to Web3 for youth has commonly been through media hype, celebrity fanfare, and video games. Youth we spoke to were all skeptical, at least at first. Laya says, “I thought it was some cyber magical money or something. It just didn’t feel real.” After learning how to use the technology to create assets themselves and even make money via NFTs without a bank account, they began to invest more time experimenting with the tech and consuming content.

These experiences are not without challenges, of course. Young people in our study shared that they need to spend a lot of time learning about the ever-evolving space and building connections to stay relevant. The financial ups and downs are more extreme than the stock market, along with the potential for major losses at the hands of scammers or platform vulnerabilities. Like Web2, there is pressure to be endlessly plugged into the constant news, with social capital to be gained by being consistently online. Some of society’s broader social issues also permeate Web3 spaces: racist NFTs and communities abound.

Despite these challenges, there is genuine excitement for a new internet built on Gen Z’s core values. Several youth shared how DAOs are flipping organizational norms, where hierarchy and experience no longer determine whether your idea takes hold. Web3 technologies are giving youth an opportunity to start careers that weren’t previously viable, find new audiences and fanbases, create financial independence, detach from untrustworthy platforms, and find and contribute to caring communities – all while building their creativity, socioemotional, and critical thinking skills online.

These experiences are helping Gen Z feel a strong sense of belonging as they find communities and causes they care about. In the words of one of our interviewees, Web3 offers a “new and shiny” way to “do good in the world.” The experiences are more accessible – and specific to them – and the decentralized nature of Web3 means that creators and the public, not big tech or its algorithms, get to determine what is current and relevant. This is especially important for creators from groups that have been excluded from power because of their race, ethnicity, gender, or orientation. One participant shared how empowering it was to no longer be at the whim of social media platforms that may make design changes that erase your content, user base, or searchability overnight.

Like any other technology, Web3 and its components can have positive and negative impacts, but its fundamental tenets mean that we will likely see promising innovations and experiences that can support young people to find agency and belonging.

“We are all decentralized for the most part,” says Laya. “And the fun fact is, I have not met many of my Indian friends…I haven’t met folks in the U.S. or any other countries for that matter… you don’t even have to connect to a person in real life, but you still feel connected.”

Neeti Sanyal is VP at Artefact, a design firm that works in the areas of health care, education, and technology.

Jaspal Sandhu is Executive Vice President at Hopelab, a social innovation lab and impact investor at the intersection of tech and youth mental health.




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The illusion of the authentic social self


Event

People-Centered Approaches to Climate and Health Action: A Conversation with Leaders from Health in Harmony and the World Bank

Collage of agriculture workers working in the field

Climate change has direct impacts on human health, but those impacts vary widely by location. Local health impacts depend on a large number of factors, including specific regional climate impacts, demographics and human vulnerabilities, existing local adaptation capacity and resources, and cultural context. Therefore, organizations will need to tailor mitigation and adaptation strategies to the regional risks and contexts of different communities.

Participants at the 2023 Global Digital Development Forum called to move away from entrenched approaches that tend to look to top-down solutions to drive change. Instead, they suggested more holistic, inter-disciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive engagements that account for on-the-ground contexts and people-centered approaches. Participatory methodologies are well suited to bring local voices into conversations, decision-making, and equitable engagement.

Headshots of the two featured speakers: Ezgi Canpolat, PhD and Kinari Webb, MD

In this panel discussion, Artefact’s Whitney Easton sits down with Health in Harmony’s Kinari Webb, MD and the World Bank’s Ezgi Canpolat, PhD to share the work they are doing to foreground the social dimensions of climate change and support planetary health. Through concrete examples, we will explore what is most difficult and most promising about working deeply and collaboratively with local partners and communities to craft a more resilient future for us all.

Topics include:

  • What does it mean in practice to put people at the center of climate and health action?
  • What’s most missing from existing approaches that attempt to reduce the health impacts of climate change, and what’s most promising on the horizon?
  • What can the COVID-19 pandemic teach us about how to work toward planetary health?
  • How might we better engage with cultural contexts and local realities as we design initiatives, particularly when it comes to ensuring impact and minimizing unintended consequences?
  • How can the predictive power enabled by Big Data and technology be balanced with local, real-life contexts to ensure that local stakeholders and citizens truly benefit?





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Design Methods and Mindsets in Global Health



Design

The illusion of the authentic social self

In recent months, we’ve seen the rise of independent social media marketed toward authenticity: first BeReal, now others like Gas have cropped up. When we speak with Gen Z consumers, authenticity feels like a buzzword—it comes up again and again as a guidepost for ideal experiences—yet, they have difficulty defining it. Instead, it feels like a reaction to the inauthenticity they see on Instagram and to a lesser extent TikTok, which they see as to blame for feeling a lack of social connection in spaces we believe should foster connection. While BeReal’s features limit the ability to curate posts, the core of its UX is the same as larger social media platforms, which limits the social connection that underpins authenticity. To design for authenticity, platforms must adopt a UX that allows users to adapt and evolve their identities over time.

Putting on an “act” in social spaces isn’t unique to social media. In 1959, Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, where he contends that real-life social situations cause participants to be actors on a stage, with each implicitly knowing their role. The character one plays depends on a variety of contextual factors: who is present, the “props” and “set” (visual cues) among others. As such, each performance is different. His theory explains why one might feel awkward when two different social groups are in the same room: the actor doesn’t know which role they are supposed to play.

In online spaces, the feed is our perma-stage. Facebook’s News Feed was designed to deliver updates on friends the same way we receive updates on local and national news. It seems inevitable that this product vision would produce performances, and highly curated ones at that. Its one-to-many nature limits standard interaction; instead of an actor-actor dynamic, we see a creator-commentor-lurker hierarchy. And because creators design their posts to cater to the masses, they are not moving from stage to stage; instead, one’s online persona feels static. Here, the light of inauthenticity shines through, as we are no longer playing together, but watching others perform.

In Goffman’s model, actors retreat “back-stage” when they are alone or with close others — this is the place where they can let their hair down and be free from keeping up impressions. While the dominance of social media’s feed might make the Internet seem like an unlikely place for back-stage settings, we find almost every social media has a direct message function. In contrast to the one-to-many, post-centric UX of the feed, these back-stage spaces are one-to-one or one-to-few interaction-heavy spaces that have come to be the most fulfilling part of the social media experience for users. Instead of solo “lurking” that can lead to comparison and loneliness, users that are active in back channels find engagement, connection, and reprieve to be themselves, or at least the character that feels like the smallest margin of performance with this particular friend or group, since they have created their “show” together.

But it’s the feed that dominates the social media experience. It permeates moments that would have traditionally been back-stage settings (for example, alone in one’s home), and so we find ourselves wanting authenticity, or a back-stage feeling, here. And so, trends like posting crying selfies have surfaced, which feel close to a cut and paste: back-stage content onto the front-stage. While a post like this could make a user feel understood or less alone momentarily, the infrastructure on social media doesn’t enable the interaction needed to produce real support, and can continue to feel designed for likes. Between glamour shots and crying selfies sits BeReal, where users post more of the “everyday” of their everyday life. Still, BeReal has been criticized for either being boring, still performative, or even exclusive in a more intimate way. A feed can’t support true connection, the table-stakes of enduring authenticity.

Outside of these two paradigms, we see a third type of space emerging. Platforms like Discord have taken hold during the pandemic as a more casual place to “hang out” virtually. Building on a chat-based UX, Discord enables users to find others with similar interests and move between smaller and larger channels as well as text and voice-based communication. Further, Discord is the hub for creative expressions like Midjourney, an AI image generator that can only be accessed through Discord using bot commands. Similarly, Fortnite builds conversation through shared experience and play, in so doing re-leveling the audience-observer dynamic and putting engagement over performance. Extending Goffman’s metaphor, we might compare the social atmosphere created on Discord and Fortnite to a writer’s room, where users engage and create together. 

A more agile space like Discord reflects the “Presentation of Self” as charted by Gen Z. This generation sees the self as a canvas for experimentation, where identity is fluid. Through creative tools and less definite spaces, creativity and play  extend to the making of self on a journey of self-discovery. Users can create and try on characters much like a comedian might on a Tuesday night, to first see if it might resonate for Saturday night, much before an enduring part of the act.

To enable more dynamic interactions , we will need to move away from a cut and paste UX approach to a ground-up infrastructure that is designed for fluidity. Taking pointers from the “writer’s room,” two principles can guide us. First, collaboration. Similar to “yes – and,” creators in authentic spaces create in tandem vs. a creator-consumer dynamic. UX of authentic spaces must lean toward chat over post, which fosters interaction and relationships that ensure it’s safe to try a new presentation of self. Second, authentic social media needs impermanence. Though a feed may refresh over time, we know that posts on Instagram will be connected to our profile for years to come. If it’s instead lost in a Discord feed, we may feel more freedom to experiment and “get it wrong.” Combining collaboration and impermanence, we might just set the stage to permit the collection of characters we all play, so that we can all feel a bit more dynamic, and perhaps even authentic, in digital spaces.





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Has corporate America broken up with design?



Perspectives

A call for cultural humility in care

An abstract composition featuring various green, yellow, blue, and purple shapes, with two sets of shapes resembling human forms merging together in the center of the composition.
Rachael Cicero
Rachael Cicero





Sitting in the waiting room, a Hmong woman feared an experience like her last, when a doctor dictated a blood draw as the only next step…

But instead, a nurse sat down with the woman and asked some questions about her symptoms, treatments she had already tried, and her hopes and fears. The woman was glad to have the chance to share her preference to avoid blood testing, which the nurse noted without judgment.

A doctor entered and warmly greeted the woman, inviting her to discuss her health condition and what might be causing it, actively listening while providing space for her to talk. The doctor suspected mild anemia and explained the condition but reaffirmed that the woman preferred to avoid blood testing. Instead, the doctor laid out a few other options, talking over the pros and cons of each.

After discussing with the doctor and agreeing on a plan, the woman left the office confident she’d feel better soon or comfortable scheduling another appointment if necessary. Later that day, the doctor reflected on her reliance on blood tests, but not all patients take them for granted, and maybe she shouldn’t, either.



The above vignette shows “cultural humility” in action. This approach fosters cultural understanding through respect, empathy, and critical self-reflection to build partnerships between providers and the diverse individuals they serve. Cultural humility has become a hallmark pathway for realizing health care that responds to the needs of diverse patient populations and reduces the extreme health disparities they often face. 

Cultural humility is needed now more than ever. If current trends continue, immigrants and their descendants will account for around 88% of the U.S. population growth in 2065. Alongside this, diversity will also grow within healthcare professions. But the current care model in the U.S. rests on a culture of biomedicine that is largely inhospitable to diverse health-related beliefs and practices. Instead, we call for ways to work with our increasingly pluralistic society to uplift the benefits of biomedicine while embracing diverse perspectives on health and healing. 

Centering lived experiences in healthcare

Within any cultural or identity group, each person’s lived experience is intricate and varied, and what is necessary to live a healthy and fulfilling life is equally individualistic. To recognize diverse needs in health care, medical training and practice have come to focus on “cultural competence,” “a set of congruent behaviors, knowledge, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, organization, or among professionals that enables effective work in cross-cultural situations.” But even with cultural competence, lived experience is often overlooked, causing providers to make assumptions about a specific patient based on learned facts about the broader racial/ethnic groups to which they may belong. This can lead to care decisions based on generalizations, resulting in inappropriate recommendations for a patient’s unique circumstances.

On the other hand, “cultural humility” is a much stronger formation for realizing culturally responsive care that honors each patient’s lived experience. It is grounded in rigorous self-reflection and a willingness to listen to, learn about, and adapt to patients’ diverse cultural values and practices. Crucially, exercising cultural humility reduces unconscious bias and stereotyping toward diverse patient populations based on many identity factors, from cultural background, race, and age to socioeconomic status, religion, and gender identity. Bias has been shown to negatively impact patient care, including poor patient-provider communication, low patient satisfaction, and mistrust of the healthcare system. A culturally humble approach to care achieves the nuanced understanding of patients’ lived experiences and unique backgrounds necessary to truly embrace cultural differences and work toward dismantling the structural vulnerabilities that result in unequal health outcomes.

Practicing cultural humility during moments of care

We see an opportunity to intervene at the most intimate level of care during face-to-face interactions between patients and providers, making cultural dimensions more accessible and the hidden barriers to care faced by multicultural communities more visible. 

Isolated tools exist that make inroads into providing clinicians with what they would need to realize culturally appropriate care. The tools fall into three focus areas:

  1. Improving communication between patients and providers 
    The Eight Questions and the Cultural Formulation Interview can be used to elicit patients’ understanding of their illnesses in the clinic. And the Vital Talk app trains providers to communicate with their patients about sensitive topics, which could be especially relevant for providers who did not have “narrative medicine” as part of their training. But cultural dimensions of care are still not a focus of the app. Moreover, with these tools, providers are still left without guidance on implementing them in practice or pragmatic ways to support their uptake in clinical settings within the time and logistical constraints of appointments.

  2. Equipping providers with cultural information
    Existing provider-focused databases like Ethnomed and CultureVision can help contextualize culturally specific beliefs about health and illness that might surface during a visit while suggesting pointers for culturally appropriate care. But accessing these tools during a visit may take up valuable time and could detract from the provider’s ability to listen and respond to the patient’s needs. The focus on the information at the level of cultural groups may also be problematic, resulting in a lack of nuanced context around each patient’s needs and preferences. Lastly, these tools provide a fixed set of information that does not change, for example, based on community member input or adapt to the needs of individual patients. They do not allow cultural tailoring or adaptations to happen in real-time during patient-provider interactions, such as through in-the-moment personalized recommendations based on information elicited by the patient during clinical visits.

  3. Engaging patients in after-care and ensuring data transparency
    Lastly, some tools provide patients with notes, information, and resources following their appointments. OurNotes is a platform that makes care notes accessible to patients, allowing them to engage with their providers during after-care and express concerns before their next visit. It encourages providers to voice record reflections, which helps them relay insights about patients to other team members while also developing their self-awareness skills. OurNotes also works to mitigate power imbalances through transparency of any data collected during a visit. While a promising development, OurNotes does not target improving interactions during moments of care.

While they have their merits, all these solutions are only piecemeal, standalone tools that imperfectly address a sliver of the patient and provider experience.

We believe a better approach is one making valuable resources less cumbersome for providers to access in real-time, least disruptive to critical face time with patients, and genuinely representative of cultural and individual diversity. This approach includes digital tools and experiences that enhance provider capacity and support them in facilitating more flexible and adaptive patient care. Recognizing that digital products tend to be one-off solutions to complex problems, we see an opportunity to capitalize on their ability to seamlessly integrate with current workflows and software, automate repetitive tasks while offering guidance on those more complex, and customize interactions tailored to individual needs and preferences. At their core, aspirational digital products would enable the practice of cultural humility during patient-provider interactions through experiences that capitalize on its foundational components: fostering cultural understanding through respect, empathy, and critical self-reflection.

We see an opportunity for the development of digital products that afford culturally responsive experiences and focus on the following elements: 


Culturally responsive patient-centered care
Patient-centered care focusing on culture involves treating patients holistically and respecting their unique health needs and desired health outcomes as the driving force behind their healthcare decisions. Digital products prioritizing patient-centered care consider patients’ needs, preferences, and values in the context of their lived experiences. They help facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients, allowing patients to share their concerns and providers to respond accordingly, enabling patients to engage in and adapt their care plans and collaborate with providers to make more informed decisions. A key but sometimes neglected facet of genuinely patient-centered care involves understanding and appropriately responding to patients’ cultural and individual identity contexts.


Empathy and active listening
Digital products should encourage healthcare providers to engage in more empathetic practices towards their patients, actively listening to them, understanding their perspectives, and validating their emotions and experiences. Providers need tools to help them prepare for cross-cultural patient interactions to elicit relevant information during clinical encounters and respond compassionately. These products would afford a more culturally appropriate and inclusive care experience by prepping the provider with language that respects the patient’s preferences (e.g., preferred name and pronouns) and is non-judgmental.


Respectful and collaborative decision-making
Respectful and collaborative decision-making elevates patient agency to allow for mutual understanding and agreement between them and providers. Digital products can support patient agency through tools that afford them control over their healthcare decisions and will enable them to own and tailor personal data, deeply understand vital medical details concerning their diagnosis and treatment – often missed during care visits – and empower them with the necessary information to communicate and collaborate more effectively with their providers on their care plans.


Continuous learning and self-reflection
To learn and be knowledgeable of the many existing cultural and identity backgrounds is a complex and seemingly infinite task. It is pertinent that providers have the tools to continuously listen and learn from the specific and diverse patient communities they serve. While speaking directly to patients and their families is critical to learning, digital products can provide automated tools that coach providers through moments of cultural misunderstanding to reflect on biases, assumptions, and beliefs about other cultures, traditional practices, and worldviews. These tools should seamlessly integrate into existing provider workflows, making it easier for them to engage in learnings during and beyond direct patient interactions.

Closing Thoughts

We believe many benefits will flow from adopting a culturally humble approach to healthcare delivery, especially by implementing appropriate digital technologies to enhance moments of care:

  • Patients can more easily find care more aligned to their needs and identities that make them feel welcome in the healthcare system

  • Patients will approach care with greater trust, as fear or drop-off due to unexpected clinical activities, tense interactions, and conflicting treatment expectations get reduced

  • Patients will engage more in their healthcare as they feel a greater sense of connection and belonging with their provider and healthcare system

  • Quality of care is improved as providers gain an understanding of diverse patient lifeworlds and are prompted to self-reflect on their own beliefs and practices, ultimately approaching all patients with more empathy

  • A cycle of learning and improvement will be embedded in the healthcare system as providers become more self-aware and reflective, inspiring these attributes in their trainees

  • Patients will experience better outcomes and health disparities will be reduced as patients are more engaged with and better served by the healthcare system

Actualizing a positive future healthcare experience for our rapidly diversifying population requires building cultural humility into the fabric of healthcare training and practice. Explore one way we envision doing this: Traverse — a vision for culturally responsive healthcare.





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Perspectives


Has corporate America broken up with design?


Illustration by Marine Au Yeung

Recently, an article on Fast Company made the announcement that corporate America broke up with design, citing that companies who were once green with Apple-envy and hungry for transformation are now jaded after realizing that “design is rarely the thing that determines whether something succeeds in the market.” Add in the recent corporate silence on the topic of design, and rumors abound – apparently design and corporate America are in trouble.

But does this really mean the relationship has fizzled out? Or could it instead be a time for reflection, re-evaluation, and evolution? Three of our Design and Strategy Directors respond to these questions and more –

Corporate America didn’t break up with design. It broke up with the mythological promise design firms sold them.

Jeff Turkelson, Strategy Director

‘Design will allow you to disrupt, transform, create and lead industries. Just do some research, run some workshops with sticky notes, prototype, and you’ll be onto  something that no one else could dream of!’

These are the false promises that corporate America has broken up with. But, there were always dissenters, Don Norman himself said it:

“Design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.”

Flash forward to today, and the hype around being a design-led organization is pretty much dead. But corporate America has embraced design in a more traditional sense—significantly expanding internal design teams—not to think of radical breakthroughs but to create good user experiences that are usable and delightful.

It’s in many ways a reversion back to the decades-old paradigm of user-centered design (though often twisted by profit incentives, e.g. designing to maximize engagement or conversion rates rather than truly serve the user).

However, the spirit of human-centered design (HCD) is not lost. It has evolved. While the idea of being a “design-led” organization has lost its allure and most in-house practitioners are focused on traditional craft, design’s value to business was always secondary to the value designers sought to bring to humans. And for perhaps largely external reasons, many corporations have begun to embrace HCD’s value-based themes: designing for accessibility, inclusion, equity, etc.

Here we see design intersect with the responsible technology movement— designers, technologists, activists, and more, seeking to create positive outcomes or at least mitigate harms. Designers don’t get to say they own this broader movement but they do play an important role in its evolution.

What goes in comes out: amplify design’s value by doing these four things.

Chad Hall, Design Director

Companies green with “Apple envy” may have invested billions of dollars in design, but few did it well, and most in a way vastly different from the design-centric companies they looked up to. Here are four easy to overlook things they could do to better gain value from design.

1. Understand the complexity of problem spaces

“Simplicity and complexity need each other,” (John Maeda), a.k.a. there can be no simplicity without complexity. Designers work hard to obfuscate the complexity that exists in the products, services, strategies, and processes we work on. Understanding and allowing time and space to work through these complexities is paramount. If designers or companies don’t understand the complexities of what they work on and invest the time and resources to make sense of it, they’ll never be able to simplify anything down into a ‘magical solution.’

2. Foster seamless interdisciplinary collaboration

Design works best when not in a vacuum. Too often, I see these situations that prevent seamless experiences: A product team separated from key decision makers; A care team that doesn’t have good insight into their patient’s experience; An education board that is far removed from the students and communities it aims to impact.

Seamless customer experiences are a product of seamless interdisciplinary collaboration. Working alongside an interdisciplinary team with deep understandings of different industries, domains, processes, or organizations at hand, designers become experts in not only crafting forms, but leveraging their knowledge to become experts in facilitating processes. 

3. Align power and incentives with desired outcomes

If companies want transformation, they need to examine their internal power and incentives structures. It’s not enough to have a vision. Fragmented teams and inequitable power in decision making yield products with poor outcomes.

To make seamless experiences, the customer experience must be singular above internal organizational divisions, product categories, and even earnings reports in some cases. The organization and culture must support this collaboration; allowing, motivating, and empowering employees to make decisions that work toward the shared goal of a seamless customer experience. Rather we often see internal competition, tailoring outcomes to please a HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), or misaligned performance measurements that incentivize personal decisions over preferable product outcomes. While most organizations might have the vision, they don’t align the distribution of power and incentives to get the outcomes they seek.


4. Be curious about the unknown

Many companies have implemented design in a risk-averse way. Expecting transformation without accepting a level of risk leads to disappointment. To curb risk, we’ve turned a designer’s intuition and mastery of skills into a scalable and repeatable process built upon the scientific method. Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design have proliferated. These are great at identifying existing pain points and undiscovered needs, but lend toward refining existing solutions through incremental improvements. This has merit and need in products today. But, it’s not going to rock the boat.

To make large leaps, we must allow imagination and intuition back into the process. Designer’s, through years of mastery, are primed to make unexpected connections that can lead to new innovations. But, this process is nearly impossible to evaluate and scale. It pushes us into the unknown future and to rely somewhat on intuition. In our data-driven world, this is uncomfortable! It’s an inherent risk. But, a risk that could lead to a potential big win.

Design is expanding and evolving — we’re counting on corporate America to do the same

Joan Stoeckle, Design Director

Design is baked into countless experiences we encounter on a daily basis – ordering ahead for curbside pickup, communicating with our healthcare providers through patient portals, and of course in the devices we use for hours each day. We’ve become so accustomed to frictionless, carefully-designed experiences that the occasional encounter with an outdated tool can feel downright grating by contrast. Were corporations truly to break up with design, as customers and consumers we would definitely notice. Perhaps their common understanding of design was too narrow from the start.

Although design was historically associated with the creation of beautiful objects and innovative products, today we also interact with invisible forms of design in the services and systems we use and are a part of. Not only was our home’s smart speaker designed, but so was the AI and the specific phrases used to communicate with it, and we are as much components of that system as the speaker itself. The expansion of design into different contexts and ways of interacting with people and systems certainly represents new and exciting frontiers for innovation, but many designers and organizations are also exploring novel and alternative approaches to the processes and practice of design – not just its outputs. 

User-centered design established a baseline of orienting around the needs of end-users. Human-centered design helps foster a more holistic view of people as more than just ‘users’ of a product, anchored in understanding motivations, behaviors, values, and more. Elements of each are central to the design thinking process that was adopted by many companies. But there are concerns that focusing only on the needs of target users results in a myopic view of challenges and opportunities and can lead to unintended consequences (ex. worker injuries in warehouses that are struggling to meet consumer demand for rapid shipping). In response, designers and organizations are questioning and reframing the process of design to foster equity and inclusion, design for diverse and complex needs, and create more sustainable futures.

The practice of design is expanding and evolving in response to social, economic, and environmental realities. Will corporations also take informed action by evolving how and with whom they create products, services, and systems? Or will many of them, as the article suggests, walk away from a narrow and outdated notion of design?

At Artefact we continue to evolve our methods in support of our mission to create better futures: taking a more holistic view through stakeholder mapping, establishing best practices for trauma-informed design research, reflecting diversity of needs and mindsets through persona spectra, guiding participatory and co-design processes, reflecting on possible unintended consequences, and more.





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Research + Strategy

Gen Z and their demands for the digital future

Rachael Cicero
Rachael Cicero
Neeti Sanyal
Neeti Sanyal

Partnership Highlight

This year, Artefact had two opportunities to partner with mission-driven organizations to understand young people’s relationship with digital technology and how they can support their efforts to shape a better future. In celebration of those partnerships with Omidyar Network and Hopelab, we highlight our approach to centering young people’s perspectives as we implemented our research and structured our recommendations.

“Our partnership with Artefact has helped us clarify how we can take action and support youth who are creating opportunities for inclusion and well-being in the next digital era. We appreciate the team’s depth of research, and their responsiveness to emergent opportunities in the work.”

Jaspal Sandhu

Executive Vice President at Hopelab

Young people and the hope for a new digital future

Youth are growing up in a vast digital system with a level of complexity that we haven’t seen before. Many features on today’s major tech platforms keep youth online by design, depleting their energy and consuming their attention. Combined with the short life cycle of pop culture and the fear of missing out, young people – especially Gen Z – are aggressively pulled online, affecting their productivity, mental health, and overall wellness. These effects will likely persist with emerging technologies such as the metaverse and web3. Still, young people are capitalizing on this ‘new tech’ to have a role in shaping a more accountable, equitable, and inclusive internet for themselves and future generations.

An inclusive, systems approach to understanding youth beliefs and behaviors

Omidyar Network and Hopelab each needed actionable insights to develop a holistic strategy and prioritize actions aimed at influencing and activating technology as a force for good in supporting young people. However, the focus of each organization’s effort was slightly different. Omidyar Network focused on identifying the core issues that animate digital native activism and organizing as it relates to technology. These issues ranged from digital rights to social justice to tech worker activism. In contrast, Hopelab concentrated on understanding how emerging technologies can uplift or detract from youth mental health and well-being.

Throughout each project, we took inspiration from well-established fields such as inclusive design and human-centered design, incorporating equitable methods affording continuous participation for internal and external stakeholders.

Participatory methods to engage internal and external stakeholders included:

  • Using simple tools like Dovetail to convey research insights and allow stakeholders to view secondary research and highlight reels of key topics discussed during 1:1 interviews
  • Hosting multiple workshops to review research insights, co-create opportunity areas, and develop critical actions
  • Hosting office hours for youth and key internal stakeholders to give feedback, check assumptions, and develop actionable priorities
  • Sharing research insights and project outcomes with internal and external stakeholders to keep participants informed, give transparency to our processes, and solicit feedback to ensure data points were representative of their voices

In addition, we took a systems approach in selecting research participants to holistically understand how youth are affected by the internet and what they are doing to take control of their future. This approach helped us understand the nuances and complexity of this problem space through various perspectives.

An overview of who we spoke to:

  • BIPOC + Youth Digital Creators
  • Digital Rights Youth Activists
  • Web3 Designers
  • Mental Health Product Innovators
  • Psychology + Digital Technology Academics
  • Metaverse Academics
  • Feminist Technologists
  • Data & Security Researchers
  • Youth Mental Health Experts

Engaging diverse youth perspectives

Whether engaging digital natives to comment on our preliminary research insights or inviting them to attend key workshops and presentations, we continuously sought to ensure youth voices remained centered. Why? Because of their diverse lived experiences growing up digital and their drive to design, create, and advocate for what they want to see in the world.

Our approach to centering young people’s lived experiences online included the following methods:

  • Conducting outreach on popular web2 platforms (e.g., Twitter, Instagram, TikTok) where digital natives are active and currently participating in conversations around technology
  • Bringing in youth advisors as co-researchers to help shape insights and outcomes
  • Creating video highlight reels with direct quotes from youth participants to better represent their words and attitudes in our research
  • Developing youth-centered design principles taken directly from one-on-one and group discussions to guide future action
  • Developing youth-centered areas of focus that steered strategies toward the issues that matter most to GenZ

Supporting young people in their pursuit of better digital futures

The landscape of digital experiences and emerging technology is rapidly changing, allowing youth to shape the development of these technologies before they are entrenched. And young people are activated, ready, and willing to be the catalysts for change. They need a platform to be heard and supported that amplifies their needs and values. We are excited about Omidyar Network and Hopelab’s work to provide young people with this platform and support. Putting youth at the center is critical if we want the internet of tomorrow to be a place where future generations can thrive.

Want to learn more?

To learn more about the Omidyar Network project, check out the case study: A Youth-Led Agenda for the Responsible Tech Movement.

To learn about the insights and outcomes from the Hopelab project, attend a talk by Neeti Sanyal, Artefact’s Executive Creative Director, at the HLTH 2022 Conference Gen Z & Web3: How a Mental Health Crisis among Digital Natives is Shaping Our Virtual Future. This panel discussion is scheduled for Tuesday, November 15th, 4:20 PM—4:55 PM PST.





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News


Fast Company honors Artefact with three Innovation by Design awards


Image source: Fast Company

Fast Company honors Artefact with three Innovation by Design awards

A version of this press release first appeared on PR Newswire


Fast Company has honored Artefact, a design and strategy firm with a mission to create better futures, as a winner and honorable mention across three categories of the 2022 Innovation by Design Awards: Rapid Response, Healthcare, and Experimental.

Fast Company’s October 2022 issue celebrates visionary design that solves the most crucial problems of today and anticipates the pressing issues of tomorrow. Celebrating more than a decade of Innovation by Design, this year’s honorees feature a range of finalists from Fortune 500 to small, impactful firms. Entries are judged on the key ingredients of innovation: functionality, originality, beauty, sustainability, user insight, cultural impact, and business impact.

“We are honored to have our work in emergency preparedness, healthcare, and retail recognized. We believe that thinking about unintended consequences and all stakeholders is critical to bringing positive change in the world. Artefact is proud to work with individuals, communities, and organizations to create a better future, by design.”

Sabrina Boler, COO of Artefact


Artefact was recognized across three categories for the following work —

Navis: Emergency preparedness

Winner for Rapid Response

Navis is a conceptual emergency preparedness system that guides people in planning for, and responding to, crisis scenarios. The concept uses conversational UI and augmented reality to help people create a personalized emergency plan on their preferred devices. A durable home hub helps people stay connected during an emergency and translate plans into action.


AdaptDX Pro: Diagnosing macular degeneration

Honorable Mention for Healthcare

Artefact partnered with MacuLogix to help create AdaptDX Pro, the first portable, wearable, and AI-integrated ophthalmic screening system for age-related macular degeneration on the market. The AdaptDx Pro overcame the challenges of traditional ophthalmic devices by rethinking the patient and technician experience, and led to earlier, more accurate diagnosis and disease management. The AdaptDX Pro first shipped in June 2020, and over the past several years has performed over 1 million tests across 1200 eyecare practices. Today, AdaptDx Pro is owned by LumiThera.


Future of shopping and food retail

Honorable Mention for Experimental

We imagined three ways that emerging technology might help customers shop with more confidence during the pandemic, while ensuring businesses efficiently manage guest volume, protect employees, and sustain revenue by guiding safe customer behavior, forecasting risk, and bringing the best of in-store shopping, online.






About Artefact
Artefact is a visionary design and strategy firm with a mission to create better futures. By partnering with leaders and approaching the toughest challenges with equal parts creativity and pragmatism, we deliver lasting change. Headquartered in Seattle, our award-winning team includes researchers, strategists, and designers with a passion for excellence and impact. Connect with us today.

About Fast Company

Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Winners, finalists, and honorable mentions of Fast Company’s sought-after Innovation by Design Awards can be found online and in the October issue of the print magazine, on newsstands September 27, 2022.












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Event

Design Methods and Mindsets in Global Health: A Conversation with Leaders from World Bank and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Neeti Sanyal
Neeti Sanyal

There is a greater need than ever to provide essential, affordable health services to everyone, regardless of where they live. Achieving this goal requires resilient, functional, and inclusive health systems. Human-centered design, and other creative disciplines such as systems thinking and strategic foresight, are well suited to formulate and strengthen such systems by providing a deep understanding of people and their needs, by actively engaging stakeholders throughout the development process, and by using a holistic approach to address the various factors that affect health and health related behaviors.

In this webinar, Artefact sits down with Tracy Johnson, Senior Program Officer at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Jumana Qamruddin, Senior Health Specialist with the World Bank’s Health Nutrition and Population Global Practice, to discuss how they are using various design and creative approaches to reframe challenges and refocus efforts to better ensure primary health care works for all.

We explore:

  • What are the factors that affect health and healthcare and how can we account for them when designing interventions?
  • What are some ways to operationalize design as a mindset and practice into an organization’s culture, structure, and processes?
  • How can we “right-size” efforts to integrate design to achieve the specific needs and goals of an intervention?





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Driving Health Equity
Through Evolving Care Models


Event

Driving Health Equity
Through Evolving Care Models


The pandemic has demonstrated the healthcare industry’s ability and appetite to adopt models of care that meet patients where they are – whether online, at home, or in the community.

In this webinar, Artefact sits down with Sara Vaezy, Chief Digital and Growth Strategy Officer at Providence and Dr. Shantanu Nundy, physician and Chief Medical Officer at Accolade, to explore the innovative and accelerated models of care here in the U.S. that are impacting not only patients today but also the patient experience in the years to come.

We explore:

  • Opportunities and risks in distributed care models such as hospitalization at home; digital models such as telemedicine for behavioral health; and decentralized models such as subscription-based care
  • What these evolving models of care mean for the patient experience, their relationship with care providers, and greater health outcomes
  • How evolving care models that center the patient might support greater inclusion and equity, creating new opportunities to reach underserved populations





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