CHALLENGE
About the BOUNCE Challenge
Welcome to the BOUNCE Design Challenge—an invitation to stretch your creativity, test your process, and collaborate in unexpected ways. This isn’t about polished portfolios or final products. It’s about the how—how you think, adapt, question, and respond to a brief in real time. We’re here to celebrate experimentation, risk-taking, and the messy middle of design. Whether you’re working solo or in a team, you’ll be given a brief that nudges you outside your usual lane. You’ll have limited time, set constraints, and the freedom to interpret the brief in a way that encourages new thinking.
Each challenge is different, you might work exclusively with people outside of the design community to help them realise the power of creative thinking, and to learn from their ways of working, or you might deep-dive into a problem to breath fresh life into it.
The goal? To push your boundaries and show how design can provoke, connect, and shift perspectives. The challenge is not a competition. There’s no winner. But there will be impact, insight, and probably a few surprises along the way.
Each time we have a new challenge we post them here and on our social channels. Stan tuned by subscribing to our newsletter to find out more.
BOUNCE x ETBI Universal Design Challenge
BOUNCE is inviting designers and design facilitators to collaborate on a new, design-led initiative with ETBI, bringing together practitioners from across the Further Education & Training (FET) sector to explore how Universal Design might be embedded across the system.
This is a paid opportunity. Fee details will be shared with shortlisted candidates.
This is a 12-week, hybrid programme that brings FET practitioners into a shared space of enquiry, reflection, and experimentation. Rather than rushing to solutions, the Challenge creates time and structure to question assumptions, reframe real, lived challenges in practice, explore multiple pathways forward, prototype ideas, frameworks, and provocations, surface blind spots and opportunities across the system.
The focus is on process over polish, collaboration over expertise, and learning that sticks. As a Designer of Design Facilitator, you’ll support multidisciplinary groups of practitioners as they work through a structured design-led process. You won’t be there to “solve” problems or deliver training. Instead, you’ll hold the shape of the process, guide conversations and collaborative workshops, help teams think differently about familiar challenges, create the conditions for inclusive, reflective, and meaningful work.
You’ll be working alongside the BOUNCE team and ETBI partners as part of a wider facilitation and support group. You may be working alongside other design or facilitation professionals, and we welcome both individual and group applications.
Who is it for?
Successful applicant(s) will work with teams, using collective design thinking to explore how universal design principles can be embeded across the ETBI. We’re interested in people who are familiar with the application of universal design principles, have experience in design facilitation, service design, or systems thinking, are comfortable working with ambiguity and unfinished ideas and who enjoy bringing diverse perspectives into the conversation.
If you have experience in education, public sector, or social impact contexts (desirable, not essential), can hold space with care, curiosity, and confidence, this may be the opportunity for you.
As a kick-off you will bring participants through the principles of Universal Design to help position the programme of work, so it is important that you are familir with these principles.
Application–Process
Applying is simple. Just fill in the application form telling us a little about your experience, use of Universal Design principals in practice and anything relevant that makes you stand out.
BOUNCE will provide programme structure and support and link the successful candidate(s) with experts in the field.
In person activity will take place in Dublin City (location tbc) and the ability to travel to Dublin is essential.
This is a paid role (fees to be confirmed with shortlisted candidates) .
There is a €20 fee for each application that supports the ongoing admisitration of the Challenge. Those with paid subscriptions to our Patreon enter for free.
Application–Timeline
Apply: Complete the application form by 20th Feb 2026 at 5:00pm
Selection: Successful applicants will be notified 23rd Feb 2026
Session Dates:
2 March (in person, Dublin) 2:00pm–7:00pm
18 March, 1 April, 15 April, 29 April (online) 1:00–2:30pm
13 May (in person, Dublin) 2:00pm–4:00pm
Preparation and Support for a final showcase of work (showcase 21st May/time tbc)
Participant Commitments
By joining any BOUNCE Challenge, participants agree to:
Collaborate: Work respectfully and constructively with everyone and operate ethically with stakeholders.
Engage: Fully immerse themselves in the process and attend all sessions.
Commit: Adhere to deadlines, timelines, and agreed-upon meetings, ensuring the completion of all necessary work.
Record: The challenge works best when learning can be shared. We will encourage all participants to record their journey to assemble into a case study.
Participants must be available on specified dates throughout the Challenge to ensure continuity and engagement. You will be required to work individually between each session, which may include prepartion, relfection, synthesis or other activities. If you are ready to take part in a collaborative and impactful design exploration, we encourage you to apply!