SEATTLE, United States — Tracy Johnson, senior program officer for user experience and innovation at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, gets mixed reactions when she makes the rounds from team to team.
“I will say there are meetings I go into where people’s faces fall and they think, ‘Oh my God, she’s back. We wish she would go away. We don’t understand her,’” she told Devex at the Seattle headquarters of the largest foundation in the world. “That is changing, and more and more I’m met with smiles, and they think, ‘Okay, Tracy is going to ask about this issue and get us to think from a different perspective and perhaps come up with some different ideas as a result.’”
Johnson is responsible for building capacity among Gates Foundation staff in human-centered design and identifying ways to apply it across the foundation’s portfolio of grants. Examples of her work include Lab.our Ward, an effort to rethink the maternity ward experience. Also called design thinking, human-centered design is an approach to problem solving that incorporates the wants and needs of the end users of a product or service in every stage of the design process — and Johnson is among the professionals bringing the practice from the private sector to global development.