Job Description

Design Intern

 

If I’m being completely honest, last June, when I started this internship I had no idea what I was going to be doing. It was my first internship at an actual company, so inevitably, I was feeling nervous. The first day, I realized there was only one other intern, so it calmed my nerves, but then I learned he was an “Architecture Intern”, so we would be doing completely different things. I got assigned the title of “Design Intern”, which to be honest, can be so many things. I was as lost as you, my reader, can be feeling right now.

 

The firm is called AEI Spaces, it’s an architecture, design, and construction firm that, through interdisciplinary teams, creates human-centered spaces where people and their interactions are the priority. As a former intern, I would also add that their main focus is redesigning offices and workspace. The first challenge when entering the firm was realizing most of the workers are architects, which means they are proficient in software like Revit, AutoCAD, and Rhino, which I am not. So the first day the question that popped into my head was… “How am I going to make it through the next eight weeks?”. Little did I know, my job would be much more important than I even thought. With time it felt clear the need for an intern designer. 

 

As I mentioned before, AEI Spaces works through interdisciplinary teams. I joined the Innovation and Development Team. Its goal was to capture new clients for the firm. How so? I then learned that in the architecture world, when a company needs to remodel its workspace, it’ll open up a contest, so all architecture firms present a proposal to it. Then, the company chooses the one they like the most and continues the project with the firm they chose. In other words, my team had to make sure the firm stood out over all the competition and convinced the client we were their best option with only a limited amount of time. My job in this team was to design proposals presentations of technical content that were comprehensible to the client who is not an architect. I had to ensure a persuasive storytelling allowing the client to understand the presentation we were giving in an engaging, exciting, and compelling way. As I offered a non-architecture point of view, I became a key point of the team, that helped guide how we were going to communicate the proposal. At the end of the day, as the client is not an architect, technical planes would be very hard to read, so we had to create a balance between visual tools like renders, mood boards, and videos that would help them comprehend what their new space would look like.

 

To understand my role more clearly, let's break it down into three main functions. As a design intern, I also had to be a:

• Communicator
• Analyst
• Researcher

Communicator 

 

The first contact a client would have with our proposal is the visual presentation. So a big part of my job was to design a personalized presentation (visual tool) with videos, and images, that would capture the client's attention. I would use the client's brand manual as a guide, to have their colors, logos, and any other characteristics of their corporate identity and present a coherent presentation of the brand's visual language. Additionally, I would also create concepts the client was interested in, for example, related to their industry or something they found valuable. Visual communication was an essential part of the job because it allowed us to give the client a sense of what the office could look and feel like, and share with them the inspiration we were looking at. 

 

Analyst 

 

Another essential aspect of the job was to act as an analyst of the way we were presenting a proposal. After having designed a presentation I had to analyze its emotional journey. This way, I could identify the parts where the client was less engaged with what we were showing and do something to regain their attention. The goal was to connect with the client’s emotionality and transmit to them more than just technical content. 

 

Researcher

 

Last, but not least, all of these processes required me to be a researcher. I was always looking for new ideas, new inspiration, and new models developed in the industry. This way, to keep our team up to date with what is happening in the interior design world. The projects that would require more research and for me, the most interesting, were the ones that went out of the firm's focus, like redesigning a restaurant or a hospital ER.