Over the past 10 years, our work has expanded beyond traditional service and product design in the social sector, and we are now regularly working hand-in-hand with communities and local organizations to design interventions in service of more equitable outcomes. Some examples include launching an incubator in Kenya for girl-led solutions to reproductive health, working with communities in Southern Dallas to improve access to quality health care, and working with refugee, immigrant, and migrant communities in the US to ensure everyone has access to reliable information about COVID-19. We’re currently looking for a Design Director to join our team who can help us continue to evolve our practice of design, with a focus on equity, participatory design, and social justice. You will report directly to a member of our Executive Team, working closely with our CEO, senior leaders, and cohort of fellow Design Directors across our San Francisco, New York, and Nairobi studios.
This would be a good role for you if you have a background in participatory design, community organizing, social work, policy and advocacy, liberation psychology, or any other field where you’ve applied equity and justice frameworks in your work. You’ll be joining a diverse, multidisciplinary team that is passionate about these topics, and about transforming our organization—and the field of design more broadly—to a more anti-racist and anti-colonialist practice. Your role will be essential in helping assess where our teams have been both successful and challenged in the practice of designing for equity, and in co-creating and formalizing structures and best practices to spread throughout our organization.
Design Directors at IDEO.org are involved in the work in a number of ways. Our ideal candidate has a breadth of experience, and can easily transition between a mode of guiding and mentorship to directly helping designing services and experiences alongside our teams and community partners.
