Overview

Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence helps create new ways for communities to use technology to harness their insights, ideas and power to act on the problems that matter to them and create the futures they want. We know well-designed systems can help promote healthy collective action at scale, but too often technology is designed to solve the needs of individuals or large organisations.

Our mission is to design digital tools and products that allow communities to respond collectively to challenges, and that help public and voluntary sector institutions strengthen trust and collaboration with citizens.

We help our partners to understand where and how collective intelligence approaches can help address the problems they’re working on. We apply collective intelligence design – which brings together insights from diverse groups of people, with new sources of data (such as sensor or mobile phone data) and digital technologies (including AI) – to develop bespoke solutions to those problems. We use rigorous research methods to test, learn and evaluate each solution.

The Role

Nesta is looking for an ambitious mid level product designer with real world experience to contribute to the design and prototyping of new digital ‘collective intelligence’ solutions. At the heart of CI design is the ability to effectively combine insights and actions of large crowds, data and digital technologies to tackle complex social challenges.

This is a unique opportunity to apply, shape and develop expertise in an emerging area of innovation practice, working with our partners and clients all over the world in a social-purpose enterprise. As part of an interdisciplinary team, you’ll work with the Centre’s software developers, researchers and product managers to create high impact digital solutions, tools and and services to help tackle climate change, improve health and increase civic and democratic participation. And you’ll draw on a wide range of collective intelligence methods from crowdsourcing, to citizen science and online deliberation.

You will be responsible for:

Product Design:

• Able to design, or contribute to the design, of sophisticated digital collective intelligence products that help deliver social impact and might cover complex user needs
• UX Design (including core user research techniques, user journeys, wireframes, prototypes, user testing etc.)
• UI Design (including interaction design, high-fidelity prototypes etc.)
• Strong visual design skills (inc branding & aesthetics), and the ability to convey complex concepts in easily understandable ways
• Understanding of service design fundamentals and able to contribute into output core service design artefacts such as blueprints
• Able to quality assure own work with an eye for detail
• Work with a clear & iterative design process, and able to convey the impact and results of work
• Strong skills in Figma and other common digital design tools
• Working within interdisciplinary teams, particularly working closely with researchers to translate the cutting edge of academic research into practice in the real world

User Research & Testing:

• Undertake user testing & results analysis of prototypes, concepts, and live products
• Synthesise and share results from user research with stakeholders, and feed learnings into designs & iterations

Stakeholder management:

• Design and facilitate workshops & meetings
• Ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional peers and stakeholders, and to explain design decisions clearly
• Good stakeholder communication skills, with both external and internal stakeholder

Strategic thinking:

• Understand the team’s long-term strategy from a design and user perspective
• Ensure that all designs line up with the strategic goals for the product

Leadership contribution:

• Advise our partners in collective intelligence design. Navigating the varying backgrounds, technical skill levels, and previous knowledge of CI
• Contribute to the design and delivery of CI training programmes

Other:

• Supporting business development activities by creating pitch materials and supporting the development of project plans
• Communicating and promoting your work, and the work of the wider team e.g. representing CCI and CI design at conferences, writing blogs, making presentations etc.

Desirable – If you do not feel that you have these skills, please don’t let this stop you from applying for the role

• Practical experience of designing and delivering products that enable collective action or behaviour change
• Knowledge of collective intelligence methods
• Knowledge of creating video animations and/or editing film content
• Front-end development skills – HTML/JS/CSS
• Knowledge of Artificial Intelligence
• Experience of designing products with a social purpose
• Knowledge of how to design for different accessibility needs