Vihara Innovation Network - Senior Design Researcher

Experience: 3-5 years experience in conducting research and participating in all aspects of design research-including planning, executing, analysis, synthesis, deliverable creation

Date of Joining: Immediately

Educational Qualifications: Degree in Communication Design/ Systems Design/ Social Design/ Interaction Design/ User Experience Design/ Public Health/ Design Research/ Strategic Design Management

The activities you will engage in:

- Health systems design and research: Participate in planning and conducting design research inquiry into the uptake on family planning methods and products.

- Deep dive into the local context, gather insights and develop actionable strategies and ready-to-deploy interventions

- Apply systems thinking and a human centered design lens to the project during the research as well as designing innovations.

- Conduct rapid prototyping and testing to create effective, human-centered, contextually rooted and scalable solutions

- Generate knowledge products that will document and share the learnings and outcomes of this effort with the wider ecosystem.

- The project is a unique opportunity to develop practical HCD-led innovations as well as trial and scale them to witness the impact they make by shifting the outcome indicators.

Skills we are looking for:

- A good understanding of the user-centered design process

- Designing and conducting ethnographic research and design research in rural contexts to identify opportunities for intervention

- Designing new research tools and methodologies, as well as employing established tools for co-design, concept generation, and rapid prototyping for product and service solutions.

- Communicating insights through powerful and clear information design i.e. reports, data visualisations, illustrations, storyboards, photographs and other media

What we love to see in candidates:

- Adaptability and flexibility within reasonable limits

- Proactive ownership of responsibilities and the willingness to learn from failures

- Curiosity and openness to collaborate and learn from different disciplines

- Outcome and impact orientedness in one's approach to design and research

Some perks of working at Vihara:

- Vihara is committed to incubating and upskilling promising individuals in leadership, business development, management and consultancy through rigorous skilling and training

- Vihara takes organisational learning seriously. We organise regular learning and knowledge sharing sessions for cross-pollination of insights and ideas between different project teams.

- We respect our employees' time. We discourage employees from working beyond office hours. In unavoidable circumstances, employees are entitled to compensatory offs

- We make deliberate efforts to create long weekends whenever possible by giving additional holidays in combination with national holidays