i-team Civic Designer

Job Details

Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876, is America's first research university and home to nine world-class academic divisions working together as one university.

The Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University (the Center) seeks a i-team Civic Designer, Lansing, MI to support a new Lansing Innovation Team.

Innovation Teams unlock creativity from within city governments and the communities they serve. These teams take partners and stakeholders through an evidence-based process to tackle the big problems in their cities no one has yet been able to solve, generate more ambitious responses, and test and adapt interventions until they produce impact. They also work closely with the Mayor, the City's leadership team, and City departments to change the culture of city government.

The Civic Designer will play a central role in deploying design-based innovation approaches to support the Lansing i-team’s work.

Specific Duties & Responsibilities

• Guide i-team colleagues, together with collaborators in government and in the community, through a rigorous innovation process, including research, synthesis and framework development, idea generation, prototyping, and testing.
• Design, plan, and deliver qualitative “design” research.
• Make research findings relevant and impactful through a variety of formats such as slide decks, stories, videos, experiences, exhibits, and design artifacts like journey maps, service blueprints, and personas.
• Employ user research best practices to create a seamless experience for city leaders, and collaborators in government and in the community.
• Develop templates, tools, and methods that government can use to improve service and program delivery.
• Create visual frameworks – like journey maps, service blueprints, and ecosystem maps – that help clarify complex challenges in human behaviors, relationships, workflow, and processes.
• Engage and collaborate deeply with local community organizations dedicated to improving air and water quality, grow economic opportunities, and boost clean energy and infrastructure.
• Plan and execute co-creation workshops with stakeholders to propose the most viable solution for the given problem.
• Stay up to date with trends in civic design and public innovation and develop materials spreading best practices and cutting-edge research and participate in a community of practice with i-teams in other cities.
• Prepare reports, summaries, presentations, visuals, recommendations, and other work products and present to city leaders, community members, BCPI staff, and other partners.
• Support the i-team and other city government colleagues in agile ways of working, including a high proficiency in using tools like Slack, Figma, Miro, Google Workspace, and work management software like Asana.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in related discipline.
• Five years of design experience, including instructional, strategic, business, and product design, or related experience.