Senior Service Designer Save

Overview 

Magic Cabinet ("MC") is a philanthropic foundation that seeks to fundamentally redefine how philanthropy and nonprofits partner for sustainable and thriving communities.We’re looking for a Service Designer who is collaborative, community-centered, systematic, flexible, and creative. Reporting to the Head of Innovation & Design, the Service Designer will architect experiences and tools that are designed around the people who use them. Reporting to Magic Cabinet’s Head of Innovation and Design, the Senior Service Designer collaborates with the foundation team to transform strategy and systems into amplified impact.

Magic Cabinet's Mission
Magic Cabinet champions communities' work by partnering with nonprofits and other philanthropists to achieve the nonprofits' missions. We do this by providing long-term capacity-building grants, access to peer networks, and advocating for the broader adoption of collaborative, trust-based philanthropic practice. 

Magic Cabinet's Vision
We believe that nonprofits, community, and philanthropy can help build a just and equitable world by working in solidarity. 

Magic Cabinet's Values

• Ongoing Partnership. We engage in deep, collaborative, long-term relationships through multi-year grants, our investments in nonprofits, and support.
• Equity. We purposefully and actively redistribute power to weigh community voice.
• Trust. We support authentic and reciprocal relationships amongst nonprofit peers.
• Flexibility. We are committed to listening and adapting to ever-changing community needs and contexts.
• Informed Decision Making. We ground ourselves in data and translate research and feedback into innovative practice.

Your role as Senior Service Designer

The Senior Service Designer leads design for new projects and pilots across foundation workstreams. This work will involve partnering closely with the Head of Innovation & Design and cross-functional team members to identify and understand opportunities, then develop and test solutions that advance our mission to shift philanthropy to center the needs and priorities of community-serving nonprofits. 

As the first designer at Magic Cabinet, the Senior Service Designer will join a team that champions user needs, shaping the foundation’s philanthropic solutions offerings, trust-based participatory grantmaking programs, and internal innovation incubator processes. The Senior Service Designer will contribute their skills to map user experiences, communicate ideas, and create frameworks that guide our products and services to open up new community-centered paths in philanthropy. 

Senior Service Designer responsibilities include:

Solutions Architecture

• Drives design strategy and processes with a collaborative, human-centered design approach. 
• Collaborates with internal teams as efforts require, including Philanthropic Solutions, Grantmaking, Research, Design, and Communications teams. 
• Articulates evidence-based user needs, generates design concepts, and crafts how people will interact with the products and services we create.
• Collaborates with the Research team to leverage quantitative and qualitative insights, incorporating learnings and hypotheses into designs and test plans. 
• Organizes and facilitates workshops to comprehensively map experiences, unpack challenges, and formulate new solutions.
• Creates deliverables to express design solutions to the team and our partners, such as service blueprints, storyboards, user experience journey maps, system maps, and wireframes. 
• Frames and tells the story of design solutions and rationale both verbally and visually.
• Identifies, formalizes, and leverages repeatable design patterns and components across initiatives.

Systems Development & Advancement

• Contributes to the development of internal human-centered design/research & development culture and infrastructure. 
• Regularly participates in sharing successes and failures among the team to inform work and the team’s continuous learning and improvement.
• Ongoing inter-disciplinary networking and learning to augment individual and institutional knowledge and possibilities. 
• Seeks opportunities to learn from and share new approaches, models, and best/promising practices in experience and systems design. 
• Attends and participates as needed in select Magic Cabinet board meetings, retreats, and donor cultivation events as ambassadors of Magic Cabinet’s mission.

Administrative Duties

• Utilizes computer and Internet-based software, including spreadsheets, presentation software, design tools, project management tools, video conferencing, survey administration, and collaborative documents.
• Participates in internal meetings and trainings.
• Participates in self- and peer-review processes.
• Participates in operational systems and procedures, such as expense tracking and documentation.
• All Magic Cabinet staff members are encouraged to participate in the betterment of Magic Cabinet’s procedures and processes. 

Miscellaneous

• Participates in and supports other organizational efforts as needed. 
• Staff members may be asked to take on special projects for Magic Cabinet or additional tasks as assigned. 

You are well qualified if you have/are: 

• 5+ years of professional experience as a design strategist, service designer, product designer, UX designer, or similar 
• Experience or interest in participatory design, equity-centered design, or community-centered design 
• Experience creating, presenting, and refining complex diagrams, such as experience maps, user journeys, service blueprints, interaction models, flows, and wireframes
• Experience planning, designing, facilitating, and synthesizing design workshops or sprints 
• Creative and comfortable visualizing information for different learning styles 
• Always incorporating research and insights into the design process and familiar with a variety of data types 
• Demonstrated critical thinking skills and independent problem-solving experience 
• Excited by the prospect of new and creative strategies and tools that center community needs and tactics within the philanthropic sector 
• A high degree of emotional intelligence
• Highly organized, with keen attention to detail and process
• Intellectually curious with a deep respect for learning and a drive for sector-wide improvement
• Experience working with culturally, economically, and racially diverse groups
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including presentations and public speaking
• Resourceful, with ability to be effective working independently or as part of a project team 
• Aware of societal and personal bias, comfortable engaging in dialogue surrounding its presence, and committed to dismantling its influence 
• A team player and collaborator with excellent interpersonal skills and the ability to work with various partners and staff graciously and with a sense of humor 
• Comfortable working with teams across offices in multiple geographic locations
• The ability to commit to limited amounts of domestic travel 
• Direct experience in philanthropy and nonprofits is not required 
• The ability to commit to limited regional and domestic travel
• Proficiency in a non-English language(s) is a plus