The Australian Centre for Social Innovation is searching for people who went into research hoping to answer the questions that mattered, or went into policy hoping to tackle the problems that mattered. Now, with some experience under your belt, you think there has to be a different way to create solutions that matter.
This is an opportunity to join a team that’s all about coming up with solutions that matter.
It doesn’t make sense to us that policy is made and then evaluated, or that research is done and then placed on a shelf. What’s even weirder to us is coming up with research questions and policy concepts without knowing what people, on-the-ground, want and need.
What excites us about research is understanding what makes people and organisations tick. Research isn’t an academic exercise. It’s incredibly practical. It’s about finding, testing, and making ideas real.
What excites us about policy is shaping the structures and incentives that affect how people and organisations act. Policy isn’t a bureaucratic exercise. It’s incredibly practical. It’s about finding, testing, and making ideas real.
If that’s what excites you, we’d love to hear from you.
Here’s what Peter Shergold, former head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in Australia and current head of the Centre for Social Impact, says excites him about our work in South Australia.
Our starting point is that ideas are only as good as they are implemented. We draw inspiration from a broad range of sources – everything from philosophy to developmental psychology to behavioural economics – but our most important source are end users themselves.
We seek out a wide variety of literature to prompt our thinking. We find that the literature can tell us what hasn’t worked and the principles of what does work, but can rarely tell us what will work in our particular context. Of course, the literature also humbles us. Our hunches are rarely new. What is new is our practice – finding ways to take ideas down to a micro interaction level and then back up to scale.
As a member of the radical redesign team, you’ll work alongside designers, community developers, and business analysts. You won’t just be conducting research or writing policy. You’ll be using different research methodologies, findings from the literature, and systems thinking to shape how we co-design with people, prototype their ideas, and make those ideas work inside and outside of government systems.
One morning, the team might be scouring the social psychology, education, & public health literatures for what makes an effective family intervention. That afternoon, the team might be rapidly creating a new measurement tool for kids and adults. That evening, the team might be testing the tool with families over dinner at their home. The next day, the team might be creating measurement tool, version 2.0, all the while building a prototype system for capturing the data and making it relevant to policymakers.
You’re a versatile thinker and agile doer – aka, you can do a bit of everything!
You have experience conducting different kinds of research (qualitative & quantitative) and looking through multiple methodological and disciplinary lenses.
You have experience working on different kinds of policy projects – from strategic planning to practice frameworks – and get how things are currently done and what levers to pull to make them work a heck of a lot better.
You have a particular strength for making abstract concepts tangible.
Above all, you’re a people person who can go from hanging out with a family in the morning to chatting with an academic or policymaker that afternoon.
Hear from Sarah Schulman, co-lead of the radical redesign team, who made the shift from working in a classic government context of engagement and consultation to working as part of an eclectic co-design team.
Policy & research are the disciplines usually involved in social problem-solving. We think they are important, but insufficient for creating solutions that excite, inspire, and ultimately create change with people and communities. That’s why we build teams with design, business, and community development people.
From design teammates, you’ll learn more than the usual participatory policymaking and action research methods. You’ll be introduced to the art of prototyping – trying stuff out in real time and chucking out what doesn’t work. Prototyping operates at an interaction level, rather than at a concept or framework level.
From community development teammates, you’ll learn how to think about people as the resource. You’ll move beyond professional service solutions and recognise the power of everyday networks and exchanges.
From business teammates, you’ll learn about different service delivery models and mechanisms for scale. We’ll explore what solutions look like inside and outside of government systems.
In turn, we’ll look to you to build your teammates understanding of:
Learn more about the role on offer.
Learn more about working and learning at TACSI.
Learn more about living in Adelaide.
Apply for the job!
It’s good to share! Do you know someone else who might be interested in joining our team? We’re looking for a few good people. Please send them a link to our recruitment site or use the sharing buttons on the top of this page!
The Premier of South Australia invested in The Australian Centre for Social Innovation to generate radical solutions to big social challenges. We set-up the radical redesign team to meet the challenge. Use your business thinking to help our team shape new kinds of solutions, and your business management skills to scale and spread those solutions for social impact.
This is an opportunity to put your entrepreneurial skills to work in creating social value.
The starting point for you and the team will be some of the toughest social problems out there: our rapidly ageing population, unemployment, family breakdown, etc. You’ll do on-the-ground research with people, in homes and communities, to identify the insights that can turn problems into opportunities. Then, you’ll prototype solutions and secure the buy-in and investment needed to turn insights into impact.
What kind of service or system could reduce the number of families coming into contact with state crisis services and yield long-term cost savings? How could we utilise the assets of an ageing population? What kinds of networks could get the long term unemployed back into meaningful work?
Our problems are the problems faced by government and social services, but when it comes to solutions, every sector is on the table. You may be working to improve an existing service, build a new platform, or start-up a new social enterprise. If our solutions work, they’ll change outcomes, create measurable value for people and communities, and save money for the public purse.
From the outset, you’ll work to identify the market and fiscal opportunities for change. You’ll bring ideas to the table from outside the social space, shape solutions to be viable, and build a compelling case for growth and investment.
You’re a walking bank of case studies, able to draw on lots of real life examples from beyond the social space, but with relevance to the social space.
You can challenge your teammates’ thinking on what makes a good solution and present tradeoffs in terms of cost and reach.
You run a mean spreadsheet and can model costs and cost-benefits over time.
You can think practically about setting up a new enterprise from scratch.
You make creative use of existing resources and build networks to make stuff happen quickly and efficiently.
You’re a storyteller – with and without numbers.
You know that business doesn’t have the answer to everything…
From teammates with a social science background, you’ll learn how to draw on ‘the literature’ to learn what improve outcomes and how to enable people to change.
From teammates with a public policy background, you’ll learn about the latest policy ideas and ways to embed radical solutions within existing services and systems.
From teammates with a community development background, you’ll learn about ways to engage people in the community and how to create change for particular population groups.
From teammates with a design background, you’ll learn how to prototype and shape interactions so that they prompt change with and for people.
We’re looking for people that can help build teammates ability to:
Learn more about the role on offer.
Learn more about working and learning at TACSI.
Learn more about living in Adelaide.
Apply for the job!
It’s good to share! Do you know someone else who might be interested in joining our team? We’re looking for a few good people. Please send them a link to our recruitment site or use the sharing buttons at the top of this page!
Work in a team alongside people from the worlds of public policy, government, community development, and business. Share with them your know-how and passion for co-design and prototyping. Learn from them how to create solutions to tough social problems that have measurable impact and go to scale.
This is an opportunity to be part of a new kind of design team. A team with an explicit mission to address social problems using an approach that starts with people and ends with new kinds of services and systems.
This team will be the first of its kind in Australia, building on the work of a growing global movement of socially motivated design teams like RED, Participle and Think Public in the UK and MindLab in Denmark.
Put your design know-how to work on some of the most real and knotty problems faced by Australia – issues such as family breakdown, unemployment, and the rapidly ageing population.
Get out of the studio and work with families, young people, and older people in their homes and neighbourhoods to co-design solutions that will lead to more people living the life they want to lead. You could be designing stuff to enable families to build their social connectedness, older people to stay active, or the long-term unemployed to have meaning and purpose.
This is more than service design. We start with a brief set by government or services, but the first stage of the project is to reset that brief from the end user’s perspective. Sometimes we end up improving existing services; often we end up creating new kinds of platforms & organisations that complement the existing service system. Whatever we create, our aim is to measurably improve outcomes with and for people.
Our approach builds on design thinking approaches. At its core, it is about listening to people and trying out early hunches with people, in context, to see if they work and how they can be improved. Design in our teams isn’t just about thinking; it’s about making stuff too.
The designer helps synthesise the team’s ideas, visualise them, and shape them into touchpoints and interactions that can be tested in real-time with real people. Some of the things we design are familiar – identities, print communications, websites, and scenarios for interactions. Some of the things we design will be new – like roles, trainings, and turning abstract policy concepts into metrics or commissioning documents.
Hear from Chris Vanstone, co-lead of the radical redesign team and a product designer by training.
You probably have a background in service design, interaction design or product design and you’re probably a little frustrated. Frustrated that you only get to work on commercial briefs or frustrated that the social briefs you do work on are not as radical as you would like.
We’re looking for designers that are people-people. People who can happily strike up a conversation with a hyperactive 9yr old or a 90yr old with cognitive impairments.
We’re looking for designers that can tease out and build on the ideas of others as well as contribute their own.
We need designers that can that can think systematically and can easily grasp the bigger picture.
We need designers who know the difference between shaping form and shaping behaviour, and want to do the latter.
We need designers that can design and produce print materials, online experiences, shape roles, and person-to-person interactions.
Design is a relative newcomer to the social space. You’ll be working alongside and learning from teammates whose disciplines have a much longer tradition in social problem-solving. To them, co-design and prototyping are likely to be something very new. Our approach is eclectic: we believe that design has a lot to contribute to social problem-solving but alone is insufficient for enabling social change. That’s why you’ll be part of a team drawing on social science, public policy, community development, and business.
From teammates with a social science background, you’ll learn how to draw on ‘the literature’ to learn about what’s been shown to improve people’s lives and how to craft solutions so they prompt behaviour change.
From teammates with a public policy background, you’ll learn about the latest policy ideas and the challenge/opportunity of connecting radical solutions with the existing service system.
From teammates with a community background, you’ll learn about ways to engage people in the community and how to prompt change for particular population groups.
From teammates with a business background, you’ll learn how to shape solutions so that they make business sense and can grow.
In turn, we’ll look to you to build your teammates understanding of and capability for:
Learn more about the role on offer.
Learn more about working and learning at TACSI.
Learn more about living in Adelaide.
Apply for the job!
It’s good to share! Do you know someone else who might be interested in joining our team? We’re looking for a few good people. Please send them a link to our recruitment site or use the sharing buttons on the top of this page!
The Australian Centre for Social Innovation’s radical redesign team works with people, from the ground-up, to come up with solutions they want to be part of. That means we have to find and activate people – in particular the non-service users and non-participants. We’re searching for community development people who want to mobilise and link-up people in new and surprising ways.
This is an opportunity to put your outreach, marketing, facilitation, and matchmaking skills to use to shake up what communities are and do.
This is an opportunity to get creative with how you attract, engage, and enable local people, local government, and local businesses to be part of the solution to social problems.
This is an opportunity to be more focussed and intentional with the events, activities, and experiences you organise so that they prompt real, measurable change.
Most of all, it’s an opportunity to be part of a team that makes seemingly ‘out there’ ideas happen rapidly.
Hear from Carolyn Curtis, formerly a social worker and manager in South Australia’s child protection service. For the last 12 months she’s worked as part of the radical redesign team and found it quite a different experience.
People are the basis of everything we do.
You will help us reach out to people where they are – be it in supermarkets, hospitals, prisons, at bus stops, or door-to-door – and engage them over time.
You will be working as part of an eclectic team that may include designers, researchers, policy experts, and business analysts. You’ll help to make and maintain the connections we need to work quickly and effectively. Here’s where your mobilisation & persuasion skills will be really useful.
But, meeting people is only the first step. We meet people in order to get to know them – their motivations, aspirations, and day-to-day experiences. And, we get to know people in order to co-design and test the ideas that just might make a difference in their lives.
You will help the team to make those ideas real: to broker the experiences, set-up the interactions, and source the materials & systems required to turn the hypothetical into the concrete. Here’s where your coordination and communication skills – along with plain old persistence and determination – will come in handy.
One morning, you might be writing copy for flyers to put through people’s doors. The next hour, you might be creating a script for cold calling businesses. That afternoon, you might be facilitating a group of community leaders. That evening, you might be helping to run a dinner with a group of families, sourcing developmental experiences from the local community.
Just reading the word ‘community’ raises all sorts of critical questions for you. You don’t see ‘community’ as one thing – but as something that is emergent and can be shaped. You’re most interested in people who don’t see themselves as part of a community. That’s why consultations, focus groups, and committees aren’t participatory enough for you.
You find most community activities and events really nice – but missing an oomph. You have a track record organising different sorts of experiences, attracting different sorts of people, and making use of local resources in new and clever ways. We often use the words ‘surprising’ and ‘developmental’ to describe in-community experiences that bring seemingly random people and things together to learn & have fun. We like a bit of whimsy!
You are intentional, but open to the unexpected. When chaos and challenge emerges, you are at your most creative and level-headed.
You are the ultimate doer – you believe the best way to make stuff happen is to motivate, cajole, and if all else fails, just do it. No task is too small for you.
We think community development is a critical, but ultimately insufficient part of social problem-solving. That’s why we blend community development with design, social science, and business.
From design teammates, you’ll learn how to brainstorm and prototype ideas that people find attractive. Prototyping means trying stuff out, and throwing it out until it starts to work. You’ll also be introduced to new concepts like user segmentation, user experience, and touchpoints.
From policy and research teammates, you’ll learn about how to come up with ideas that prompt behaviour change. You’ll be introduced to qualitative and quantitative research methods – from ethnography to evaluation design – and to policy process.
From business teammates, you’ll learn about what it takes for ideas to spread and scale. You’ll be introduced to business modelling, social impact analysis, and start-up structures and processes.
We’ve got loads to learn to improve the radical redesign approach. We hope you can:
Learn more about the role on offer.
Learn more about working and learning at TACSI.
Learn more about living in Adelaide.
Apply for the job!
It’s good to share! Do you know someone else who might be interested in joining our team? We’re looking for a few good people. Please send them a link to our recruitment site or use the sharing buttons on the top of this page!
