We started Forge because government services deserve better.

Not better in a theoretical way. Better in the way that matters to a small business owner trying to register a company at 11pm, or a family navigating a benefits application in a second language, or a senior trying to renew a licence without calling anyone for help. Government digital services are hard to get right. The policy is complex, the stakeholders are many, the timelines are brutal, and the people who need the service most are rarely in the room when decisions get made.

How do you take something complex and make it work for the person on the other end?

Forge was founded in 2016 by Scott Davis and Shelley Voyer. Scott came to design through human factors engineering — multi-year studies of fatigue and cognitive performance during Canadian Coast Guard Arctic icebreaking operations, then Nokia, then Dell, accumulating 27 years of practice at the intersection of how humans actually behave and what systems ask of them.

Six US design patents came out of that period, including one referenced in a Steve Jobs filing. Shelley came from building things: a global games portfolio at Nokia, a children's edtech platform in 80 countries, an accelerator that backed 58 women-led tech companies. Between them, the question was always the same — how do you take something complex and make it work for the person on the other end?

Government digital services turned out to be the hardest version of that problem. The policy is complex, the stakeholders are many, and the people who need the service most are rarely in the room when decisions get made. That's the problem Forge was built to fix — from the inside, one project at a time.