Associate Designer at International Rescue Committee (IRC)

Job Overview

• Airbel is IRC's innovation lab.
• We work alongside people affected by conflict and crisis to design services that are more useful, more dignified, and more likely to last.
• This role puts a designer in the middle of that work in West and Central Africa, close to the communities, the frontline workers, and the questions that decide whether a product or service actually helps someone.
• You will be our eyes and hands in the field.
• You will run the design research, interact with clients and providers, notice what they do and why, and turn what you find into prototypes you test and refine on the ground.
• You will work closely with the Human Centered Design Lead, who will support synthesis and concept development as you shape your own work.

Major Responsibilities

• Run design research in the field: interviews, observation, and time spent with clients and frontline workers.
• Stay close to one geography or work stream long enough to notice the patterns that only show up over time.
• Make sense of what you see on the ground, and find the sparks of innovation already present in people's own workarounds and ideas.
• Turn research into prototypes, test them with real users, and iterate as you learn rather than following a fixed script.
• Bring what you learn back in a form the team can use: clear notes, visuals, journey maps, whatever makes the insight legible.
• Partner with country program teams, technical leads, and frontline staff with care and respect, earning the access that good research depends on.
• Work across francophone West and Central Africa, and other humanitarian settings as needed, adapting quickly to new contexts and teams.

Job Requirements
Work Experience:
We would like to see how you think and work, including:

• Experience doing research with people, in any setting: design research, ethnography, UX or product research, participatory or action research, or any other kind of qualitative research. What matters is that you went past a script to understand why people do what they do.
• You have built or set up something (a service, a small pilot, a tool, an app, even a rough paper version of an idea), tested it with the people it was for, and changed it based on what you learned. We call this prototyping, but you do not need to have used the word.
• A way of noticing opportunities in the everyday: workarounds, small details, and the things people have already figured out for themselves.
• Something that shows how you think: a portfolio, a case study, a research write-up, photos of a prototype, or a project you helped shape. It does not need to be polished, but we would like to see your thinking in some form.

Demonstrated Skills and Competencies:

• Strong research skills: you can plan and run fieldwork, talk with anyone, hold ethics with people in vulnerable situations, and read a situation for what it is telling you, with care in how you gather and record what you find.
• Strong prototype testing skills: You build rough, test early, and change things during testing rather than waiting for a finished version.
• Real curiosity about why people behave as they do, and the judgment to find the spark of an idea inside it.
• Comfort in the field: You can spend two weeks at a stretch in a field site and do good work there.
• Adaptability across cultures, languages, and changing plans, held together by humility and care for the people you work with.

Language Skills:

• Working French and English, enough of both to do research and to work with teams elsewhere on the continent. Proposals and presentations can be written in either language and translated.

Preferred experience & skills:

• An eye for making insights legible through visuals, maps and simple decks.
• Experience in humanitarian, health, or community settings.

Work Authorization:

• Candidates must have the legal right to work in the country where the position is based.