Application closing date: 09/04/2019
Location: Llandaff Campus
Salary: Circa £21,000

Job description

Role Summary:

We are looking for a graduate designer to work on a project that will increase the innovative capacity of a manufacturing company. The role is part of a project supported by design expertise from PDR at Cardiff Metropolitan University. The project is about the design of high value, digitally enabled products, supported by new service offerings.

The project aims to embed new design skills within the company, leading to increased efficiency and growth through the production of products that can meet the stringent safety standards required for the company to move into the production of new classes of Fire and Safety products. It will give the company the capability to iteratively test development opportunities from early in the process, both for testing market acceptance of ideas and in preparation for the required external testing.

The project comes with a personal development budget and support from professional award winning product and service designers.

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

This project is enabled via a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP). KTP is one of Europe's leading government funded collaborative programmes helping businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity using expertise, skills and resources from a UK knowledge base. For graduates KTPs' provide a programme designed to develop the skills and knowledge of future business leaders whilst embedding new knowledge, systems and processes in the host company. High calibre graduates are employed to work on specific projects of strategic importance to companies, whilst being supported by a dedicated University or College. All graduates spend around 10% of their time in training and development.

The successful candidate will be responsible for managing a collaborative, Product Design based Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project between Knight Fire and Security Products Ltd (Knight) and PDR, an internationally recognised design consultancy which is part of Cardiff Metropolitan University.

To find out more about Knowledge Transfer Partnerships please see:

http://ktp.innovateuk.org/

The Company

Knight Fire and Security Products Ltd. based in Cardiff are the market leading manufacturer of magnetic contacts, junction boxes, panic buttons, call points and other alarm ancillaries. All products are manufactured in the UK, Knight export worldwide and service the UK market. Knight produce mouldings for their own security products and run contract moulding work for their customers.

For more information on Knight Fire and Security Products Ltd see:

https://www.knightfireandsecurity.com/

The Knowledge Base:

PDR is a leading European multidisciplinary design and development research centre. The Centre combines award winning consultancy, highly rated research functions and leading knowledge transfer programmes. PDR has six groups of activity: new product development, service design; user-centric design, single-patient solutions (SPD); advanced manufacturing (workshop and prototyping technologies) and Ecodesign.

For more information on PDR - International Centre for Design and Research see:

http://pdronline.co.uk/

For more information on Cardiff Metropolitan University see:

http://cardiffmet.ac.uk/

Principle Duties and Responsibilities:

The KTP Associate will be responsible for introducing a product design function that exploits user centred design and service design knowledge in combination with fire and security regulations which will transform the company from that of a traditional manufacturing company to that of a service-orientated, digitally enabled and value-driven product provider.

The product designer position plays a pivotal role in the development of new, innovative fire and security products within Knight. As such this is a hands on product design and development position. Design and development activity in the context of fire and security products will be in close collaboration with the in house design team at PDR and engineering team at Knight.

The role will require the associate to quickly develop research and project management skills which will allow them to organise and facilitate workshops, analyse data and effectively convert findings into strategies for new product development.

The KTP associate will be based at Knight in Cardiff and will benefit from a training package in excess of GBP 8.5K, with regular meetings from PDR's supervisory team.

The associate will benefit from mentoring from academic and professional supervisors as well as guidance and support from their KTP advisor.

Prof. Andrew Walters atwalters@pdronline.co.uk or Julie Stephens jstephens@pdronline.co.uk can be contacted for more information on this KTP project.

When applying for this position please ensure that a CV and a covering letter explaining how you meet all of the essential criteria is attached.