Design Jobs Board

Great Service Designer? Love the idea of working on Net Zero/Energy Transition Projects?

Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) is part of a network of elite technology and innovation centres set up by Innovate UK. The ESC works with companies that are focused on exploiting the opportunities created by the need to transform global energy systems; not only playing a part in accelerating technology-based solutions, but also engaging with Government to address the market mechanisms and business models that will be required to enable such solutions.

ESC will create a critical mass for business and research innovation, focusing on electricity, heat and combustible gases. This centre will be an important part of the UK’s innovation system, making a major long-term contribution to UK economic growth.

Context

The Energy Systems Catapult’s vision puts consumers at the heart of a low carbon energy transition. The Catapult’s Consumer Insight Team plays an important part in this, gathering and analysing data to produce insights about how and why consumers use energy, and using this insight to work with others to design and deliver consumer-centred low carbon energy products, services and policies. The Consumer Insight team is made up of 3 areas – Research, Design and Trials (see more at peoplelab.energy).

As a Service Designer in the Design Team, you will have a multi-disciplinary role, working across technical and research teams, to develop and design energy service propositions and user experiences for great user outcomes and valuable insights. You’ll often be working on sophisticated, long-term projects like the Living Lab, often supported by Government funds.

We are growing quickly and there are lots of opportunities to learn new skills and work with our multi-disciplinary team including people with market research, design and field trial expertise. We are all working together to put consumers at the heart of the energy sector.

During lockdown, we have been working remotely and as we begin to focus more on the future, we intend to embrace a new refreshing way to utilise our office in Birmingham City Centre . As a consequence we are developing a flexible approach to the workplace , which ensures we keep some of the benefits of home working whilst enabling the Catapult to operate efficiently, this hybrid way of working may result in the majority of us working from home for a good chunk of the time, merging the best bits of both office and home working.

Key Deliverables

• Facilitate the design of energy products and service propositions by identifying benefits to consumers through existing knowledge or research, or setting new research objectives.
• Design and document customer journeys to deliver the propositions making clear the research goals throughout the journey.
• Organise, facilitate, and document design workshops to support the development of energy products and services and the delivery of their customer experience for external and internal clients.
• Set the objectives for the end to end service delivery across a range of actors across the service design (e.g. user research, data science, UX, software and hardware), supporting the specialists across the actors to set the requirements.
• Understand the constraints for each of these domains and how they might influence decisions made on the service design (e.g. availability of data from sensors, complexity of data analysis or client needs).
• Demonstrate user-centred design by using outputs from existing user or market research to support the design process.
• Create and manage experiments and prototypes to test assumptions across the customer experience
• Refine and document service architecture, including service “parameters” and contract language and for innovative energy services.
• Support establishing the Consumer Insight’s design capability and design process, including implementation of relevant design tools and techniques.
• Be the primary interface for service designs across data science; building physics; software and hardware engineering; user research, User experience and market research teams amongst others to make decisions on the service design delivery.
• Document the preferred service design decisions with justification for decisions made based on any known consumer needs or behaviours and Energy Service Provider (ESP) and device manufacturer’s interests and risks.

Key Work Activities

• With support from other domain specialists, make design decisions considering the trade-offs between the needs and constraints of each domain (user research, UX, building physics, software and hardware etc).
• Refine service models that can align commercial incentives to deliver experiences people want, with support from Business Modelling and Business Development teams.
• Work with business analysts and systems engineers to set the requirements for the end to end service design across domains.
• Support UX design colleagues to create great experiences that generate insightful user feedback on consumer comfort, convenience and cost drivers when using innovative energy services.
• Justify, define and document new parameters for energy service contracts.
• Become the focal point between commercial, technical and consumer specialists to deliver service designs

Status: Permanent /Full-time strongly preferable (however can potentially be flexible)