Graduate Design Associate - ongoing applications

Our future plans involve bringing in graduates and early career designers in the near future. If you have recently graduated or are graduating in the next year, we'd like to hear from you and we'll be in touch when suitable opportunities arise.

At Edge Innovation, we are a small team of design and innovation professionals, working with a diverse range of public sector and private sector clients. We work with them to develop better innovation processes and on implementing these processes. Our Graduate Design Associates help refine our design innovation framework, evaluate and capture impact and support our continuing growth.

Below is a description of the Graduate Design Associate job role and what we are looking for. If the description sounds like you, we would love to hear from you by emailing your CV and portfolio to melissa.bourseau@ed-ge.uk.

Role purpose

  1. Support our clients and partners’ innovation efforts, with a design-led approach to deliver value for organisations and citizens alike
  2. Support the ed/ge internal team to evolve distinct methods, mindsets and processes to progress the maturity of our design-led innovation capabilities

Responsibility

  1. Support our client and partners
    • Conducting design research across a number of public and private challenges, make sense of this research to enable design development
    • Facilitating conversations between cross functional teams (in meetings and workshops) to frame challenges and identify solutions
    • Communicating outputs and outcomes in an engaging and inclusive way
  2. Support the ed/ge internal team
    • Researching the latest design-led and open innovation thinking
    • Attending and capture workshops and their effectiveness
    • Refining methods and processes based on insight

Skills 

In a nutshell an ed/ge Graduate Design Associate should be canny, think critically and creatively deliver.

Canny

People are at the centre of our work, whether understanding their behaviours and what that means for design or working collaboratively in teams to deliver what is needed. Therefore, the following skills and experience are especially important for us:

  • Working collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams at pace
  • Demonstrating that you are a self-starter and have an entrepreneurial spirit
  • Experience of and comfortable with managing ambiguity
  • The ability to articulate and advocate for people-centred design in a way that others understand
  • Planning and delivering people-centred design activities i.e. creative workshops, experience mapping
  • Understanding and experience of a range of people-centred research methods, knowing when to use them and how to apply them correctly

Critical thinking

When we talk about critical thinking, it’s not nit picking or box ticking we are talking about. We think critically about the way things are and are often unsatisfied with what we find. We want to actively participate in making things better, for us that means the following skills and experience matter:

  • Ability to systemically break challenges down so they can be understood by teams
  • Experience of applying a range of techniques for analysis of research data and synthesis of clear findings that teams can understand and react to
  • Using data and research to influence decision making
  • Ability to balance analytical thinking with intuition and hold an opinion based on multiple often conflicting sources
  • Ability to critically talk about your own work

Creative

Last but by no means least we believe a design-led approach should harness creativity. To us this means our work should be joyous, expressive and make uncommon connections so we can help shape new meaning. We take pride in the craft of our work and would like that to be a mark of how we are seen externally. For us that means:

  • Bringing joy and expression to your work
  • Skilled at exploring ideas and bringing them to life
  • Able to make uncommon connections
  • Experience of gathering inspiration to inform thinking
  • Ability to present research findings and development in compelling ways
  • Experienced with a variety of methods for prototyping and iterating products, services and systems