Osmos works on both local and European scales with a particular interest in the intersection between people, resources and place. Join us on our mission to drive sustainable and inclusive change in areas such as public space and community development, urban ecosystems and local production chains. You will contribute to high-impact projects that shape sustainability practices across a wide range of industries and sectors. Osmos offers an exciting opportunity to work with a dynamic and passionate team supporting change for a world in transition. 

What you’ll be doing:

• Collaborate within multidisciplinary teams to address complex problems.
• Conduct user research and usability testing.
• Prepare, facilitate and process workshops to gather information and validate decisions. Apply techniques from a human-centered design, service design and design thinking to understand needs and translate them into intuitive and effective outcomes.
• Create visually compelling and user-friendly designs (digital and print) including websites, presentations and communications material.
• Communicate concepts and ideas effectively to stakeholders and user-groups, incorporating feedback and iterating designs based on input stakeholders and users. 
• Synthesise ideas and observations into reports.

What we’re looking for from you:

• A keen interest to learn and grow within the team.
• At least 2 years of professional experience within design, planning, sociology, project management or associated disciplines with practical experience in participation, collaboration, and communication.
• A strong  understanding of process management, participation methodologies and tools for collaboration.
• Confident communication skills in both Dutch and English, with the ability to effectively present and articulate complex concepts to diverse stakeholders. Proficiency in other languages (especially French) is very welcome. 
• Experience with  design software such as Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) and familiarity with digital prototyping tools.

What you’ll get from working with Osmos:

• Opportunities to learn and grow skills in project development, facilitation, stakeholder management and process design. 
• Flexible working hours. 
• Space at a freshly renovated office, five minutes walk from the Brussels South station. 
• Training and personal development.
• A freelance contract for a minimum 4 days a week work.

Interested? Send the following to brussels@osmosnetwork.com: 

• A CV describing your work experience 
• A letter of interest to tell us about your work interests, how you work and how you could contribute to our team. 
• A quick sketch or infographic to tell us a little more about yourself. 

Applications are open until July 10, 2023. 

Interviews will be held in July.

Start from September.

In addition to the concept of personas and archetypes, Angus Jenkinson in 1993 got more interested in mapping out the journey of these targeted users through what was originally called “day-in-the-life descriptions”. Particularly within advertising, it was important to observe the personas in interaction in their real interface, behaviour and attitudes towards a brand, as it had been observed that customers could be divided into segments or tribes which portray similar buying behaviours, and whose personality and characteristics towards the brand (product or service) can be understood in terms of common values, attitudes and assumptions.

The concepts of personas and archetypes have met with criticism of reductionism from the moment of their creation. Yet, reductionism is apparent in our daily lives in order to allow ourselves to manoeuvre throughout an increasingly complicated reality. In a lecture on social perception, I tend to start with the question as to why babies sleep so much? The answer is simple, they have very few categories to categorise all of the incoming information bestowed upon them. Their basic frame of reference is, I like this, I don’t like this. As they grow older, this frame of reference becomes more complex and aligned with the complexity of our daily reality, albeit in gradual steps. Therefore, reducing reality into a shared categorical view is something we naturally do in order to make reality more graspable and our view on it communicable. If we didn’t have the ability of categorisation and learning, we’d have to relearn and devise a new understanding of everything around us in order not to fall into chaos.

Another criticism against personas and archetypes tends to be that they are too stereotypical and therefore promote the use of stereotypes. The human brain tends to stereotype people very rapidly in order to make predictions about the world around us and so reduce fear (a predictable world is much less stressful compared to a completely unpredictable world). In a spontaneous fashion, the human brain categorises people according to humanness, age, sex, skin colour, sexual orientation, aggressiveness, trustworthiness etc. Most of this happens in under 700 milliseconds as measured by electroencephalograms. What is interesting about this is that the human brain sees such categorisation as a tool to understand reality more fluently. The danger lies in the non-critical acceptance of this categorisation as a true representation of reality allowing us to make judgments before even perceiving other important contextual information which could severely alter our judgement of such a situation.