Industrial Design Intern

About the role

You are a motivated, passionate Industrial Design Intern, looking to expand your design capabilities in a growing segment of industrial tools. Working as the liaison for customers, you will design creative solutions based on user-centered product objectives. You will partner with innovation leaders, engineers, product management, and fellow designers to gather insights, define design criteria, and lead product design to ensure form language and product experience expectations are being met.

This role will focus primarily in three areas:

• Working on active New Product Development (NPD) projects where observation, brainstorming, concept generation, storytelling, and illustration will be core functions of your role.
• Collaborating with various stakeholders in the company to ensure projects adhere to VBL guidelines, manufacturing constraints, and that user-centered features remain intact through a variety of in-house projects.
• Thinking big picture and using your curiosity to create products, solutions, or applications that have never before existed in the industry.

Responsibilities

• Participate in product research and uncover opportunities that effectively translate needs into actionable design requirements.
• Be heavily involved in upfront concept ideation and development, solving newly found needs and opportunities.
• Participate in the design, development, and refinement of physical products and graphical user interfaces.
• Use thought strategy to develop user experiences for products through both digital and physical means.
• Generate creative design proposals by using a variety of illustration techniques to provide visual portrayals of design directions.
• Use computer software to develop virtual models and renderings of different designs to communicate design intent to internal teams, stakeholders, and business partners.
• Create physical prototypes that represent accurate design directions to gain alignment and direction with CoE teams.
• Work with CoE teams, Enerpac Operations, and other specialists such as mechanical engineers or manufacturers to evaluate whether design concepts will fill a need at a reasonable cost.

Skills

• Creativity that extends beyond product design with the passion to create and build something from nothing on the Design & Innovation team.
• Understanding of the design process and successful application to multiple projects.
• Well versed in product form language, ergonomics, user-centered design, design for manufacturability, and product interaction.
• Curiosity in a changing landscape of design, technology, and user experience trends.
• Foundation of user empathy and creative storytelling.
• Strong consumer-centric approach to design, demonstrating strong design thinking processes and methodologies.
• Experience in Pro-E, SolidWorks, or equivalent 3D software tools.
• Highly proficient in Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, SketchBook Pro (digital sketching), as well as analog sketching.
• Excellent demonstration of rapid visualization, including quick ideation sketching.
• Understanding of mechanical design.
• Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills, including the ability to communicate concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Education and Experience

• Education Requirements: Currently enrolled in an Industrial Design Program (BFA or BS) from an accredited university.
• Experience Requirements: None.

Physical Demands

• Employee may have to lift documents/work materials up to 30 pounds in weight.
• Employee will have to be able to walk/climb to a variety of primary work locations, including traveling by air/auto and potentially remote sites.
• Position may require travel up to 25% of the time depending on assigned projects.
• Employee will need to listen, understand, and speak with team members in person, telephonically, and electronically at all levels within a diverse workforce and with supported organizations.
• Employee is able to work in front of a personal computer for extended periods of time.

Work Environment

Primary work environment is in a temperature-controlled office setting but may also involve visiting different manufacturing facilities where following appropriate safety protocols at the location would be required. The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.