UX Designer, Design Sprint Facilitator — Public Spaces Incubator

Contract UX Designer, Design Sprint Facilitator — Public Spaces Incubator

We’re a nonprofit R&D lab that’s reimagining social media. Join us in building digital public spaces that connect people, embrace pluralism, and build community.

We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders. We want more healthy, flourishing spaces on the internet. We have two main strategies to achieve this: helping local communities across America create more flourishing digital spaces and developing prototypes for digital conversation with public service media organizations.

We work by partnering and co‑designing with community stewards (moderators, administrators) and public institutions. We’re in this to serve, remove obstacles to power, and make life significantly better for all people, especially folks from underestimated communities. We think this work is essential for democracy.

• Co‑plan, co‑lead and co‑facilitate design sprints on the themes of AI/public conversation and news creators, including structuring the day‑by‑day agenda, sketching activities, voting, and prototyping.
• Partner with our product director, staff researcher, as well as other internal stakeholders to help scope each sprint into a clear, well‑bounded shared brief, and to help shape the shared knowledge base (research insights, subject‑matter expert input, past prototypes) that grounds the sprint.
• Guide the team through the "map & understand → sketch & diverge → discuss & decide → storyboard & prototype → demo & retro" arc, including designing sketching exercises (e.g., Crazy 8s, worst‑idea/flip‑it) suited to each problem space.
• Coach engineers and other non‑designers on the design process, especially writing user stories, mapping user journeys, and building user flows.
• Facilitate rapid, structured prototyping using AI‑assisted design and coding tools: actively coaching the team to stay in low‑fidelity long enough to interrogate product mechanics and key hypotheses before leveraging AI tools to generate high‑fidelity output.
• Simultaneously participate in sketching and prototyping activities during the sprint and actively contribute to the body of work being produced using the design/prototyping tools of your choice. (As the only designer on the sprint team, focus on ideas that benefit most from a designer’s perspective, expertise, and execution.)
• Help the team engage thoughtfully with an unfamiliar user group (news creators) and open‑ended, still‑forming problem space (AI and agentic interfaces), including translating research and provocations into sketch able, testable concepts.
• Collaborate closely with our product director to synthesize insights from the sprint and help shape recommendations for how to carry innovation work forward into subsequent quarters.
• Maintain clear documentation of sprint artifacts (briefs, user stories, journeys, flows, prototypes, retro notes) for the team and future sprints to build on.

• Substantial experience planning and facilitating design sprints both remotely and in‑person, ideally including experience adapting the canonical sprint format to suit the needs of the team and the problem space (e.g. smartly compressing the 5‑day sprint into 3 days).
• Strong grounding in the fundamentals of UX process — user stories, user journeys, user flows, wire framing — and skilled at coaching non‑designers (engineers, researchers, PMs) through these steps.
• 3+ years of experience in product design, including expertise in Figma and experience working on cross‑functional product teams and shipping products/services.
• Organized and excellent facilitator and communicator: able to hold a room (over video or in person), synthesize divergent input in real time, and keep a small team aligned and moving through a tightly scheduled sprint.
• Adept at providing the right structure and scaffolding that will accelerate a team’s exploration of ambiguous, open‑ended problem spaces.
• Comfortable working alongside product, research, and engineering as equal collaborators and peers.
• Hands‑on, demonstrated experience using AI coding/design agents (e.g., Claude, or similar tools) to accelerate prototyping, paired with a clear…