Work

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

We partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on their journey to bring a human-centered design approach to their investment process. We developed a service model and guide to help frame their use case development from the perspective of the people and communities they impact.

Originally developed for the Global Health division, the guide has been adopted across the Foundation to help bring a human-centered lens to stakeholder alignment, investment prioritization, and strategic problem-solving for some of the world’s most complex challenges.

“Artefact was an excellent partner in helping us move from a solution-first mentality to more deeply understanding and defining the problems we aim to solve. The service model and guide have been enormously successful in helping us relate to the communities we serve and identify how best to respond to their needs.”

– Tracy Pilar Johnson, PhD
Design Anthropologist
Senior Program Officer, Insights, Global Delivery Programs
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

City of Seattle

The IAC fosters collaboration between the tech industry and local government, furthering innovation in city departments so that they may better address community challenges. As a co-chair, Artefact is helping the IAC use design thinking to identify opportunities for multi-sector collaboration and develop actionable strategies for city departments.

We facilitated a series of capacity-building workshops to assist the city in framing its innovation strategy for public-private partnerships, working with 25 city departments and 16 companies to surface and prioritize six key opportunity areas for collaboration. We aligned the skills of IAC tech companies to the areas that they could best support, and are developing clear engagement models for these partnerships to move forward.

As the IAC advances its first seven projects, we are excited to continue supporting this important collaboration leveraging local tech knowledge and innovation expertise to tackle issues facing our city.