Are you a designer or design graduate interested in co-facilitating virtual or live design workshops and/or guiding others to building, testing and pitching their first product/service? Are you curious or interested in how design can enhance social science (i.e anthropology) or solve complex societal problems? Are you looking for a flexible paid work opportunity that you can easily do alongside other activities?
Then come join us in Namla!
Context
Namla’s bootcamps helps young researchers or professionals further explore their applied anthropology skills through a 6 day guided process offering (field)research practices and helps participants bring the insights into an iterative, design-thinking process. The first three days are guided by two anthropologists and the following two days are guided by one or two designers (depending on group size). Participants experience a hands-on approach to research and -after going out in the field- are guided through a pressure-cooker style design process that helps the participants consolidate user-insights to come to a clearly defined, viable problem-space and ideate on solutions through a set of converging and diverging design frameworks. Participants are invited to validate their value proposition, concept poster and/or prototype, depending on the type of solution and will experience the iterative design process, and they are guided to a pitch towards a stakeholder on the final day of the bootcamp.
Description of the workshops
Every Namla bootcamp contains a Design workshop on day 4 and a Pitch workshop on day 5. Workshops can be physical (usually in The Netherlands) or digital – via Zoom and Miro. The first session is on design (from introducing design to formulating a How Might We to creating a value proposition as a visual poster/mock up website). The second session is on pitching (and visual representation of ideas). Participants are grouped in 3-4 groups of 3-5 participants and will have to be guided through their designated MIRO-spaces in the case of online workshops, or frameworks with postits in a live setting. The workshops have been designed and streamlined, we are looking for facilitators to run them.
In the Design workshop, participants are firstly asked to briefly share what they have learned from their research, for context – and might be lightly challenged on the depth or scatteredness of their insights. Dialogue between the students is encouraged. By focusing the conversation on the target audience (user) and insights, the group is guided into formulating and choosing a How-Might-We design challenge (converge) and is asked to navigate to the next adjacent framework, where they will generate idea’s and map their feasibility to pick a viable solution. The facilitator may help fill the frameworks when groups are unable; for instance, it is quite common for a group to have dialogue on a possible solution space, but then fail to note the solution space on the board. This can lead to overthinking an idea and as a facilitator it’s important to understand when an idea is discussed enough so they can try to come up with another idea or solution, or even start combining some of the idea’s noted down before. Encouraging students to create and share their notes and content is vital for both the experience and the process.
In the Pitch workshop, participants learn about a framework for storybuilding, and how to use visual design to their advantage (color schemes, fonts, lay-out, etc.) to make a presentation that sticks. In some bootcamp formats, part of this workshop is a dirty pitch followed by feedback from the facilitators.
Role requirements & responsibilities:
- Create and maintain an open, friendly, vibrant collaborative (digital) environment
- Able to explain UCD/Design Thinking philosophy and able to answer questions participants might have on this
- Thorough understanding of the Double Diamond design-principle to guide participants through diverging and converging frameworks
- Thorough understanding of User Centered Design process to help participants translate their insights into products/services (value proposition, usability testing, prototyping, etc.)
- Able to guide a group of participants towards the correct amount of complexity for their prototyping phase, depending on the knowledge, ambition and speed of any given group
- Able to advise on, steer and propose (visual) design concepts on-the-fly for participants that have little to no knowledge on design and (visual) communication
- Able to guide participants on how to ‘pitch’ and visualize their product or service by using Presentation Design-concepts.
- Able to use prototyping and presentation tooling such as Canva or similar tooling and able to guide participants in using the tooling. (Other tooling, like Adobe XD is not accessible enough for the setting)
- If you are able to teach workshops in Dutch as well as in English, this is a plus.
Offer:
This is a paid assignment. Depending on your experience and the source of the project funding we can offer between 40 and 100 per hour on a freelance basis, excluding VAT. This can include some preparation and travel time/cost, which we would discuss per bootcamp. If international travel is required, it will be covered.
Contact:
If you are interested please send an email to rosalie@namla.info with a short motivation and your cv – we will reach out to plan an appointment.