Together with many people and partners, CIVIC SQUARE are visioning, building and investing in social and civic infrastructure for neighbourhoods of the future, rooted in the heart of Birmingham; our home city.

Our Dream Matter Designer will create a wide range of bold, inspiring visual materials, tools and processes to inspire and entice one another as we gaze and build towards collective futures.

This is a new design role as part of the Creative Resistance mission area of CIVIC SQUARE, working across all 5 portfolios of work that make up our Creative + Participatory Ecosystem:

• The Front Room
• Everyday Extraordinary
• Proofs of Possibility
• Deep Demonstrators
• Department of Dreams

You will be joining as part of an early team of convenors, designers, storytellers, weavers and more building out live work from the Creative Resistance mission area, underpinned by the research, findings and approaches of the Neighbourhood Regenerative Economics Lab.

The title makes reference to the part of our design system that is predominantly felt an experienced here: dream matter. The key values in this layer of our design is bold, imaginative work to inspire and entice one another as we gaze and build towards regenerative futures

In this role you will:

• Create a wide range of bold, inspiring visual materials, tools and processes that are underpinned by creative, participatory invitations to explore, contribute, design and dream together with local neighbours and national and global communities of practice
• Interpret and contribute research and learning to our design system, and connecting to the mission and values of our work using design-led methodologies of all kinds
• Synthesise, interpret, and visualise the dreams of many through our work, to inform and be informed by the Neighbourhood Regenerative Economics Lab portfolios in parallel
• Work across a number of different team assemblages in the organisation and in the work of Creative Resistance: listening, observing, creating and holding spaces that help to unlock collective visions, patterns and bold ideas as they are experienced at the human(e) scale

You Might Thrive In This Role If…

• You take a transdisciplinary approach to design and are interested in applying your skills to complex societal challenges
• You love working with people and are driven to uncover what motivates them, particularly their dreams, aspirations, hopes and fears, approaching this with care and empathy
• You have skills or a background in areas such as experience design, visual design, illustration, digital design, media content curation and creation, or other design-related fields
• You know the capacity to dream is not democratised, and understand the intersections of imagination and identity in how we relate to the future, acknowledging and working to build beyond the injustice and inequity in our current systems into new liberating futures
• You thrive when working on multiple projects that are at different stages of development, and are able to manage your own time and workload to deliver high quality outcomes on schedule
• It’s your dream to work in a multidisciplinary team, sharing your process and learnings live in the open to exchange practice and create connections across an ecosystem of work
• You work comfortably on digital platforms such as Medium, Kumu, Miro, Notion and enjoy discovering new formats, and new combinations of these, for synthesising and sharing
• You know Adobe Creative Suite or open software equivalents like the back of your hand, but also draw inspiration from and can create dynamic work in print and analogue mediums.
• You like to keep your work varied and adapt to different projects and scales of work, in particular enjoying working with other artists and practitioners to realise something beyond what you previously believed to be possible
• You love to experiment, test and try new things, and aren’t phased by prospects of failure, uncertainty or not having a fixed outcome in mind when playing through design
• You are interested in transition design, speculative, critical and conceptual design for long term and regenerative futures
• You are inspired by work like the examples embedded below, and would like to work collaboratively with our Creative Resistance and design teams to build a distinct voice, framework, and ways of communicating for CIVIC SQUARE