Designer (A Healthy Life)

Designer

c. £46k plus excellent benefits 

This is a full-time role but we offer a range of flexible working arrangements and encourage our people to take advantage of them.

Blackfriars, London – Hybrid Working 

We are recruiting for a Designer

About Nesta

We are Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale solutions to society’s biggest problems. Our three missions are to give every child a fair start, help people live healthy lives, and create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet.

For over 20 years, we have worked to support, encourage and inspire innovation. We work in three roles: as an innovation partner working with frontline organisations to design and test new solutions, as a venture builder supporting new and early stage businesses, and as a system shaper creating the conditions for innovation.

Harnessing the rigour of science and the creativity of design, we work relentlessly to change millions of lives for the better. Find out more at nesta.org.uk.

Your role

A Designer is a confident and competent professional who can work across the entire design process to develop solutions that meet people’s needs and have a positive social impact. You will work on a range of different projects within Nesta's A healthy life mission and beyond, meaning your tasks will vary from day to day.

This role is for someone who has worked on design projects that have met the needs of end users and stakeholders. The successful candidate will guide and engage people from various professional backgrounds through the design process; ensure mission teams and partners balance the needs of people/service users with business and social objectives; and take the lead on regular research, prototyping and testing with end users.

As a Designer, your work will involve applying your design expertise to create solutions to some of society’s biggest problems in the food system. You will be expected to:

• Plan and scope design processes and articulate the value of proposed activities to support the overall delivery of projects within the Innovation Mission.
• Plan, undertake and support user research to inform strategic decisions and the design of potential solutions.
• Design, develop and test potential solutions with end users, as well as encourage and support others to do so.
• Facilitate workshops and design sprints to rapidly design, test and iterate potential solutions.
• Produce design iterations from low-fidelity sketches to functional prototypes.
• Support the end-to-end design of interventions, often involving multiple channels, touchpoints and partners.
• Ensure Nesta and our partners balance the needs of end users with business and social objectives.
• Work with a multidisciplinary team to design, prototype and test innovative solutions.
• Facilitate participatory approaches, including collaboration and co-design.
• Work with and support others within the mission and across Nesta to use design approaches.
• Contribute to the identification, development and pitching of new work.
• Contribute to improving Nesta’s approach to design.

Minimum qualifications

• Experience in a design discipline, such as service design, user experience design, product design, etc., including using design thinking and agile approaches.
• Experience working on multiple design projects that have met the needs of end users and stakeholders. Ideally, working across the end-to-end journey of a service that involves multiple channels and touchpoints.
• Experience undertaking a range of activities from client engagement to user research, prototyping and testing.
• Experience in guiding non-designers through a design process.
• User research: Ability to conduct and plan for interviews, observations, ethnographic/immersive research and other research methods. While you are not expected to be a quantitative researcher within the team, you are expected to be comfortable using quantitative data.
• Evidence and context-based design: You are able to work with others to use evidence (qualitative and quantitative) to inform the design of projects, products, and services. You can absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to produce simple and effective solutions.
• Prototyping: You have experience in using a variety of methods of prototyping and user testing and know how to choose the most appropriate ones. You know how to solicit feedback to iterate on ideas.
• Communication skills: You can listen to the needs of users, stakeholders and partners and interpret them in a way that is clear for both audiences. You know how to manage stakeholder expectations. You can be flexible, and you are capable of proactive and reactive communication.
• Facilitating decisions and risks: You know how to identify key risks with a design and strategies and adapt to them using a range of techniques.
• Community collaboration: You know how to work collaboratively within a group, actively networking with others and varying feedback for the appropriate time to ensure the discussion sticks. You can use your initiative to identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them.

Desirable

• Experience creating functional prototypes using code or other technologies.
• Experience designing interventions with a social purpose.
• Experience designing interventions relevant to our Healthy Life innovation mission.

What we offer

Salary: circa £46k plus array of benefits, including private medical insurance, dental insurance, the ability to buy and sell annual leave, eyecare vouchers and more

Location: Blackfriars, Central London - hybrid working arrangement, with a minimum of two days working from the office.

Term: Permanent

Hours: This is a full-time role, but we offer a range of flexible working arrangements and encourage our people to take advantage of them. Many do.

Reports to: Design Lead

Making an application

To apply for this role, please submit your application before 8:00 am on the 6th of November 2023.

Round one interviews will take place w/o 13th of November 2023, and round two interviews (which will include a 10-minute portfolio presentation) are expected to take place w/o 20th of November 2023.

At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organisation that is more innovative, more creative and gets better results.

We want our workforce to represent the diversity of the people and communities we serve. We also want our workplace to be one where different experiences, expertise and perspectives are valued and where everyone is encouraged to grow and develop.

This means that when we are recruiting, we actively seek to reach a diverse pool of candidates. It also means that we are happy to consider any reasonable adjustments that potential employees may need in order to be successful.

We recognise the importance of a good balance between work and home life, so we do everything we can to accommodate flexible working, including working from home, compressed or part-time hours, job shares and other arrangements.

Please just let us know in your application or at any stage throughout the process (and beyond) if these are options you’d like to explore.