Position Summary:

The Service Design practice in Chicago seeks a unique professional to help lead content.

About IDEO IDEO is widely recognized as a world leader in the design of products, services, environments and strategies that enable our clients to grow their business. Our innovation efforts are focused on human centered design, applying our holistic and highly integrated methodologies to significant design, brand and technical challenges. In all aspects of its work, IDEO seeks to help our clients deliver high value to end-users and demonstrable benefit to society as a whole.

IDEO’s more than 470 design thinkers are experts in industrial design, interaction design, engineering, business factors, human factors and communications design. They create a culture rich in ideas, experience and empathy which defines each of our eight locations: London, Munich, Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Palo Alto and Shanghai.

Six practices operate across IDEO – Service Design; Consumer Experience Design; Smart Space, Software Design; Health & Wellness and Transformation. Whilst all practices span many of IDEO’s locations four operate out of Chicago – Consumer Experience, Health & Wellness, Smart Space, and Service Design. A few people work exclusively within each practice in business development, senior client liaison and content leadership, but the majority of the team – the design community – work across all practices.

About our people The people at IDEO are T-shaped. The vertical is a deep creative craft, a special talent or expert skill, the horizontal a curiosity to learn, an ability to understand and respect the knowledge of others and a collaborative and open mind.

IDEO thrives on peer relationships rather than hierarchies; on teams rather than lone thinkers. IDEO is fiercely protective of our open collaborative approach and believe it is the key enabler for us to deliver innovative, groundbreaking work.

About the Service Design Practice The Service Design Practice currently resides in the Chicago and London Locations.

The practice offerings are: Design of service products Design of service experiences

Our clients include: Financial PNC Bank 1st Source Bank of America

Health Blue Cross Blue Shield

Retail/Food McDonalds 3M

Information/Communications AOL

How we think Design Thinking makes a difference in the world. It enables us to apply design to a broad range of problems in many spheres by looking at the world through multiple lenses and using the insights we find, to generate new service products and experiences and deliver innovative propositions and support for implementation in the market. * We look at ‘desirability’ – tapping into the latent need of consumers, ‘feasibility’ – interesting technologies, organizational assets and ‘viability’ – identify interesting new approaches and business models * we apply a highly collaborative approach both internally and with our clients.

Design Thinking is inherently a prototyping process; once you spot a promising idea you build it. We build to think.

Key Activities:

As a service expression/design leader you should be able to:

* think systemically to innovate new service offerings
* translate multiple perspectives into concise powerful people-centric design solutions
* push the boundaries of conventional design to visualize the service world (main challenge is that the services world is more intangible than tangible)
* go deep and visualize services across any combination of platforms (identity, marketing materials, product packaging, on-line experiences, environments, etc.).
* prototype at various levels of fidelity, with experience doing and initiating such work
* tell a compelling story; develop and guide the communication of points-of-view that enable our work to get tractions with our clients, with our designers and with the market place
* work in highly creative, multidisciplinary teams (human factors, industrial design, engineering and business factors, to name a few)
* lead content and inspire  teams to design innovative propositions for our clients
* nurture client relationships
* understand the client’s position and their specific needs within their organization
* identify risks and communicate their implications clearly to the client and project team
* manage client expectation, project milestones and deliverables with the project teams
* work with IDEO’s marketing team to develop/communicate our service offering for internal and external use
* scope work and contribute to the business development process