Research Fellow in Design

About the role

Northumbria University’s School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries is seeking a Research Fellow (Service Design) to support an innovative project focused on co-production and co-design with health and social care teams. This exciting role offers the chance to shape real-world change and improvements in collaboration with staff, service users, and stakeholders, influencing policy and practice at regional and national levels.

The Research Fellow (Service Design) post, will support the application of co-design approaches with a range of health and care delivery teams, identifying, defining and prototyping potential service-delivery insights as a key element of the Partnership for Workforce Sustainability.

The Partnership is a new venture, funded by the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme, aimed at addressing workforce sustainability challenges in key areas of the NHS. The partnership brings together researchers across five universities, and will work with policymakers, healthcare professionals and system leaders to generate high-quality evidence and develop actionable solutions to workforce challenges.

Working closely with the academic Design Lead, wider research team, external partners, and funding bodies, the postholder will work directly with partner organisations in the UK Health and Care Services sector. This will require excellent communication skills suited to co-design workshop settings, confident visual design communication skills (e.g. using Adobe Creative Suite) and experience writing-up design research for reporting and academic publication.

The post is offered at 0.6FTE over a period of initially 3-years, (with the potential for this to be extended to 5-years as the Partnership programme progresses).

About the team

This Research Project is being delivered across departments at Northumbria University, with key disciplines including Design, Healthcare, Social Work, Psychology and more. The post holder will be based within the School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries at Northumbria University. The School is a vibrant community with the Design programmes having 1400+ students including Masters and 40+ PhD candidates.

Northumbria University ranked 4th in the UK for research power in Art and Design in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and our research environment is rated 100% work leading.

In this role, the appointed candidate will also benefit from working alongside prestigious funders and project partners (NIHR, NHS, Newcastle University, Oxford University and more) and will be a key member of the team affecting real change in NHS health and care services.

About you

Applicants should hold a PhD (or equivalent experience) in service design, co-design or closely related discipline and have significant experience of conducting research in social settings, and of working with stakeholders through a practice-based approach, delivering a full design process (from research, through inception to implementation)

This role is ideal for someone with a background in participatory research and/or practice-based service design using co-design approaches. If you are passionate about using design to tackle complex societal challenges, join our team to make a tangible difference and develop your career in a supportive environment, committed to research excellence and societal impact.

Further information about the requirements of the role is available in the person specification.

If you would like an informal discussion about the role, please contact the Design Lead matthew.lievesley@northumbria.ac.uk

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