The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center is a free museum located next to the headquarters of the Gates Foundation in Seattle Center. Our guiding belief is that all individuals have the capacity to create positive change and contribute to improving lives. Our mission is to be a catalyst to educate, inspire, and motivate local and global awareness and action.
Our exhibitions showcase bold design innovations that are working to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges ranging from sanitation and maternal and child health to vaccine delivery and fighting disease. IN PROCESS was conceived to expand the experience beyond our physical exhibitions (we average around 80,000 visitors a year) and broaden our reach to create a virtual and participatory experience to demonstrate the power and importance of human centered design and innovation around solving real issues.
As a new microsite (launching in late Feb. 2019) for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center’s main website (discovergates.org), the interactive experience walks a user through the design thinking process in a very accessible and engaging way. It starts with determining what is the problem or challenge that you care about solving. It’s goal is to show that designing and innovating is always “in-process” as you journey through research and discovery, listening, share, testing and iterating on the users’ ideas.
Case studies alongside the design process provide inspiration and demonstrate that innovations that empower, transform and improve lives can come from anyone and anywhere. We plan to add to the design case studies over time to build a “library” of inspiring design projects to feature and for users to reference and for students and educators to use as a resource for their curriculum.