Adaptive Path Blog

As has already been reported by a number of those who attended, Microsoft invited a group of fourteen “leaders in various aspects of the web community” to Redmond on Wednesday to discuss some of their ongoing projects, including preparations for next year’s Mix Conference. I’m pretty sure I got on that list thanks to Microsoft User Experience Evangelist David Shadle, whom I’ve enjoyed collaborating with over the past year. My invitation came courtesy of Beth Goza, who let us know that the final hour of the all day event would be devoted to a Q&A with Bill Gates.

There was a tremendous amount of material covered in the morning, and some free-wheeling conversation about conferences and outreach during the afternoon. Bill arrived right on time, and was ushered into the room with minimal fanfare. He took the empty seat at the conference table, which happened to be right next to me. After a short description of some of the work he’s involved with, both at Microsoft and with his Foundation, the question period began.

You should follow the links above to hear more about what others asked, but as for me, I asked Bill to what extent he saw experience design having an impact (if it had any) in his Foundation’s work to address issues in health care and education. It was obvious from his answer that he doesn’t think of his work in the terms that we, as practitioners, would - but everything he described involved redefining the way certain problems are viewed, to ensure that solutions benefit those who needed them most.

Bill described a small number of the efforts his Foundation is engaged in, but an example that stuck with me was their work to completely redefine how certain medications are made available to patients in poverty-stricken areas of the world. Multi-dosage treatments that require repeated return trips to see a doctor (e.g. tuberculosis) work just fine in the first world, but represent a tremendous failure where regular visits are difficult or downright dangerous. The Foundation has focused its efforts on distributing a single injection that releases necessary medication over time; in doing so, they’ve reinterpreted the problem to resolve the difficulties needy patients find in their current experience with the treatment.

People all over the world face difficulties imposed on them by tools and systems that were designed with no input from them. In that room with Bill Gates, I was aware that I represented a class of professionals who have devoted themselves to building humane systems and tools, in the hope of making improvements (big and small) in the lives of others. When Bill asked me if he’d answered my question, I realized that he had in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In his willingness to reconsider a problem like TB in a manner that addressed both the medication’s efficacy and how it fit into the the lives of patients, he’d demonstrated a commitment to the same principles we believe in as a community of user experience designers.

It was not in a way I would have expected, nor in the terms any of us would have used, but Bill Gates laid out a framework for providing solutions to the humanitarian crises of today that took a decidedly “recipient-centered” approach. Having been lucky enough to meet him, I believe he is in the business of reconsidering everything, and working for the benefit of everyone involved.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 14th, 2006 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Conversations, Experience Design, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This post is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.