Ciarán Duffy

Ciarán is a versatile designer from Ireland with a passion for social innovation and purpose-driven business. With more than a decade of experience partnering with global health and humanitarian organisations, he brings together expertise in user research, business empathy, and digital prototyping to create products and services that address both people's everyday needs and strategic organisational goals.

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Ciarán has guided organisations including UNOPS, UNHCR, TalkToLoop.org, OpenMRS.org, OpenFn, Gates Foundation, and Siemens Healthineers in creating digital products and services that are both intuitive and inclusive. He champions accessibility in design – ensuring people of all abilities can equally perceive and understand the digital experiences we create. As an enthusiastic practitioner of Object-Oriented User Experience design, Ciarán works to unite Human-Centred Design's empathic approach with technical excellence, ensuring user focus and technical excellence work hand-in-hand.

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With deep expertise in design systems, Ciarán helps organisations achieve more in less time and scale their operations more effectively. Throughout his career, he has led teams working with various technologies in low and middle-income countries, including SMS and conversational interfaces, while designing primarily for web and Android devices. He works closely alongside development teams to ensure designs are not only implemented successfully but truly fit for purpose. As AI tools continue to emerge, Ciarán actively experiments with ways to leverage them for creating more realistic prototypes and strengthening the product development process.

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Previously, Ciarán served as a start-up coach with the Gaza Sky Geeks incubator in Gaza City, in partnership with Mercy Corps. In this role, he worked to ensure design played a central role in product strategy while supporting teams in launching new businesses across Palestine and the Middle East. He has also mentored students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, focusing on design methodologies and UX design tools to help build the next generation of design practitioners.

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Since 2023, Ciarán has served on Sonder Collective's Board of Directors, where he safeguards the legal and financial interests of the organisation while collaboratively shaping its future direction. Before joining Sonder Collective, he worked at Germany's largest independent design consultancy in Berlin, partnering with many of the country's leading companies across public and private sectors. In 2016, he co-founded the award-winning service Refugee Text, a chatbot for refugees. His work has been featured in The Guardian and The London Design Museum, and he is an occasional speaker at conferences and meet-ups around the world.

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Fuera del trabajo, Ciarán es pianista de jazz, entusiasta de la comida picante y amante del vinilo. Le gusta viajar a lugares nuevos e inexplorados, hacer senderismo, montar en bicicleta y leer libros sobre todo ello.