THE ACCELERATOR

How do you put your design skills to work on an everyday basis? This question has been constantly asked and answered over several years through this framework designed to support ENSCI graduates as they enter the world of professional practice.

All ENSCI graduates are offered the Experience Accelerator programme, which gives them the opportunity to join a team of their contemporaries who pool their skills to undertake partnership projects supervised by the design school. It allows these recently graduated designers to take control of managing the project, suggesting appropriate methodologies and managing the partner relationship. In this way, they can develop their project management skills, gain more experience and build a track record in complementary fields or areas where they would like to strengthen their skills.

The challenge of this Accelerator is to give young people the opportunity to accelerate and take ownership of their careers by providing professional project leadership from A to Z. For these young designers, it provides an effective way of easing them into their professional lives, at the same time as giving the project partners a new perspective on their project and an appreciation of the contribution a designer can make to the success of a project.

ENSCI trains ‘generalist’ designers who are open-minded, agile and have an appetite for particular fields of design, but who are able to adapt fairly easily to the range of contexts they encounter. They approach projects without preconceptions. Where others struggle to think outside the box they started in, ENSCI designers have the ability to evolve the project itself, reformulate the question, explore unknown territory and deliver the project successfully regardless of circumstances.

“The accelerator made me realise that it’s possible to be more adventurous about a project”, ENSCI Industrial Design graduate Thaïs Coutinho

It is a training structure designed by ENSCI to facilitate the integration of young designers into professional practice, at the same time as integrating design into different sectors of the economy.

The Accelerator is intended for young designers recently graduated from ENSCI (with fewer than 3 years’ professional experience) and for companies in the broadest sense (from major manufacturing corporates to SMEs, new economy companies, training organisations, etc.)

The Accelerator is a way for designers to:

— enrich their professional practice
— gain experience in leading a project that benefits the company
— develop a genuinely creative strategy that is relevant to the project context
— develop arguments that make the project a reality
— acquire professional experience with a real-life project
— develop a real aptitude for teamwork 

The Accelerator is a way for partners to:

— gain experience of working with designers on group projects
— develop a better understanding of how design can add value
— stimulate innovation 

The Accelerator experiments with professional learning situations that are equally beneficial to young designers and project partners. The project, real-life situations and group working are central to this training programme in which young designers learn from the project partner and vice-versa.

It also introduces graduates to particular business sectors, and supports the development of new forms of the economy, such as education and social innovation. It offers young graduates the opportunity to develop complementary experiences and skills that will strengthen their professional status in public innovation, explore design and innovation practices for public action, and lead innovative projects in partnership with public actors.