Thales | Sam Pennington

"My experience of being a design intern at one of Europes biggest aviation and defence companies"

Placement year | Design case study | 2017

CLIENT: Thales UK

SECTOR: Aviation, Defence & Transportation

DURATION: 1 year, 2 months

ROLE: Digital, UX & UI designer Intern

WHAT I DID: Worked in an Innovation incubator

- UI & UX Design

- Digital Design & Branding

- PoC Design

- Workshop facilitation

- Usability testing

- MVP & Innovation methodologies

In July 2017, I joined Thales UK working in the "Innovation Hub" based between Crawley, West Sussex and Green Park, Reading.

Thales is a French multi-national corporation that designs, builds and integrates electrical and future technological systems into several markets including Defence, Transportation, Aerospace and Security across the globe. Thales as a global entity employs 64,000 skilled individuals and has a presence in 56 countries. As an example of their scale, Thales are the world leaders in Air Traffic Managment systems as well as the world leader in Defence Electronics and installation. Statistically, every two out of three commercial aircraft take off and land using Thales systems. The range of activities Thales covers enabled me to have an incredibly fascinating and challenging year.

I worked in the Innovation Hub (IH) in Research, Technology and Innovation (RTI) for 14 months which is a multi-disciplinary team of engineers, business leads, psychologists, designers, and consultants.

They serve as a support function to all the six business units in the UK to develop new and exciting concepts and to help foster and encourage innovation throughout the business.

STEM Sussex - June 2018

My role within the team was the Digital Design and User Experience Intern. The year was challenging and required adaptability and professionalism. It was found you may be pulled onto projects, sometimes out of your comfort zone and with large expectations but you had to be ready to learn fast and engage full attention to detail in order to satisfy project requirements.

I had the opportunity to get involved and lead a wide variety of projects ranging right across all business units. An example of this was when I was involved in within a bid on Maritime Electronic Warfare where I worked within the proof of concept team to develop an initial design with a team of software engineers and human factors engineers which is now being designed and built in collaboration with BAE systems and CGI for the MoD.

Workshops

My responsibilities on projects ranged from Graphic Design and branding such as logo design, banner design, infographics, UI & UX design of proof of concepts (PoCs) through to wireframing and creating fully interactive Adobe XD mockups.

I also had the opportunity to work in customer engagement reaching out to companies such as Intel, IBM, Northern Rail and BALPA. I also assisted with facilitating workshops and conducting user requirements capture for conceptual projects. We utilised innovation methodologies, AGILE, Google 5-Day Sprints and design thinking to help teams across the business think creatively on problem areas. For example, I worked on helping to facilitate a workshop with the Royal Navy on the future of Maritime Autonomous Systems.

Workshop with Northern Rail - May 2018

PoC & MVP Design

I also worked within the founding ideation design team that created the inital PoC for Thales Soarizon: The new Innovative end-to-end SaaS digital platform to help commercial drone operators scale their operations which is currently being built as an MVP in the Thales Digital Factory.

SaaS Design

I worked closely on one occasion with the team from Thales GTS (Locomotive) who were scoping out the possibility for a new platform to sell to customers as a SaaS platform such as Northern Rail. Following the workshop I assisted to facilitate I developed this PoC mockup to display the type of technical solution we could produce for them. As a result of this the PoC was validated by the customer and users and is in development.

Tablet UI Design

For another short project I worked with the AVS business unit (avionics) who were pitching the development of a future avionics program to develop the next generation of commercial airline cockpit SAT-COM user interface. I designed this tablet application that was developed and was used to show the future of cross-bearer communication for airliners saving money and time for airlines.

Web Design

Annimation & Video SFX

Above is an animated Infographic for Project SOARIZON website created using Adobe After Effects. I also developed a high expertise in video production and SFX and have had my work published in MoD training packages for the Watchkeeper UAV.

Analytics dashboard UI

This is another example of a concept analytics dashboard I designed as a result of a workshop with Thales Defence Missions Systems. I have developed an ability to quickly mockup dashboards focussed around Bootstrap grids and visualise data according to their heirarchical importance.

Branding & Comms

I also had the opportunity to work on developing comms and marketing material for events and schemes that were being hosted at the new HQ in Green Park, Reading. I was given briefs by event organisers under strict brand guidelines to create new content to draw in participants and attendees. This content included an array of pull-up banners, posters, web headers and infographics that are still used on site to this day and are seen by thousands of employees and vistors.

This content can still be seen in the lobby at Thales UK in Green Park, Reading to advertise these Innovation events. Across the year I was also involved in dozens of other small projects for creating marketing material, infographics and presentations that I am unable to share.

International-BusinessPDF-[Recovered].jp

Conclusion

I am incredibly grateful for the variety of projects and the level of responsibility given to me over the last 14 months and the experience has been completely invaluable to the progression of my career as a professional designer.

I also represented the company and my team at events at The Digital Catapult London and STEM Sussex. I also represented the team at internal conferences and graduate induction events across the UK. The Thales internship program has been the bedrock to my new obsession with digital interface design and has equipped me with the experience and tools I need to be an impactful designer.

Back to Portfolio

p e n n i n g t o n