# B. Prendergast (@renderg.host)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/renderg.host
Headline: Product strategy & UX design to ease your organisation’s growing pains
Website: https://renderg.host/

## About

Hi! 👋 I'm Barry, an Irish UX strategist and designer based in Berlin, Germany. For 20 years, I've helped ambitious organisations ease growing pains and solve complex problems through clear conversation, rapid prototyping, and rigorous testing against the right metrics.

I help companies achieve focus, collaborate more effectively, and get to market faster. I have led teams and shipped products for early stage startups and multinationals working in academic publishing, AI, data analytics, energy, government, healthcare, and more.

I specialise in outcome-driven experience and interface design for digital products and services. I practise lean product management, user research, and UX design to build strategies, teams, and design systems that help organisations achieve their goals.

## Experience

- **Designer at InspireBox** (2006 – 2007)
- **Senior UX Designer at Brandwatch** (2015 – 2016)
  Helping enterprise companies become more data-driven by better integrating, visualising and sharing timely relevant actionable insights, alerts and reports. — As a Senior Designer at Vizia, I lead the design from discovery to launch for new product experiences and experimental features for C-level, market research, analyst, business development and content marketing users.
  
  My team's work had a direct and positive impact on the digital transformation initiatives of clients such as American Airlines, Bank of America, British Red Cross, Samsung, Twitter, Walmart and Unilever.
  
  I also collaborated with product and engineering to design and implement the company's first scalable design system.
- **Senior Graphic Designer at Impact Media** (2004 – 2006)
- **Prepress Technical Specialist at Standard Printers** (2001 – 2006)
- **Lead Product Designer at Morressier** (2019 – 2022)
- **UX Strategist & Designer at renderghost** (2019 – present)
  I work with startups and nonprofits to ease their growing pains, and get better products to market faster. I specialise in outcome-driven design strategy, design practices, design operations, and design systems.
- **UX Design Manager at Pure360** (2014 – 2015)
  Helping organisations acquire and retain new customers, increase revenue and deepen customer loyalty through targeted content marketing. — As design team lead, I set product design strategy, led and grew the design team, matured design practices and career development paths. I worked with product managers and engineers to redesign and launch the Pure360 Campaign product.
- **UX Designer at Mediatonic** (2012 – 2014)
  Enabling gamers to play more inclusive, approachable, fair and fun games. — I worked with product owners, game designers, artists and developers to create award-winning games for clients such as AdultSwim, Namco, SquareEnix and Ubisoft, as well as Mediatonic's own IP for mobile and console platforms.
  
  I researched, designed and tested new gaming experiences that attracted audiences, removed usability barriers to play, provided simple and clear feedback, and connected players on the couch and online.
  
  As the first UX designer at Mediatonic, I also promoted and coached better design principles and practices, and matured cross-functional collaboration rituals.
- **UX Designer at Schlumberger** (2010 – 2012)
- **UX Strategist & Designer at Foster Made** (2025 – 2026)
  Leading service design strategy for a major US healthcare provider, working across in-centre and telehealth care delivery models. Core work spans stakeholder research, service blueprinting, and the definition of key success metrics aligned to business scalability and operational efficiency goals. Outputs directly inform executive-level strategy, connecting patient experience improvements to growth objectives across the organisation.
- **Principal Product Designer at LEO Pharma** (2019 – 2019)
  Enabling people living with a skin condition to get a diagnosis, communicate with their healthcare providers and receive clear personalised treatments more easily. — As Principal Product Designer at LEO Pharma's Innovation Lab, I collaborated with dermatologists, ethnographers, data scientists and patients to research and design experimental medical devices that use computer vision and machine learning technologies to diagnose skin conditions and provide timely, relevant and actionable treatment advice.
- **Principal Product Designer at EDF Energy** (2017 – 2019)
  Helping residential bill-payers better understand and manage their energy consumption. As principal product designer for EDF Energy's innovation lab working on the Smart Energy initiative, I worked with engineers, business development managers and startup founders to research, design and launch experimental web, mobile and hardware products for energy usage monitoring, disambiguation, waste reduction and automation for residential bill-payers.
- **Consulting Design Director at MyGoodPlanet** (2018 – 2019)
  Supporting environmentally conscious shoppers to make informed and sustainable shopping decisions. — As interim design director at MyGoodPlanet, I helped set the company's design strategy, grow and guide the product design team, and establish scalable UX practices and operations as they pivoted from news publishing to e-commerce.
- **Senior Service Designer at EDF Energy** (2017 – 2017)
  Helping residential bill-payers better understand and manage their energy consumption.
  
  — As staff service designer, I collaboarted with senior stakeholders, engineers, ux designers, customer service managers and OFGEM regulators to enhance the residential bill-payer's experience buying energy, understanding their usage, resolving billing issues, and staying out of debt. This was a strategic role working at a strategic level in the Customer division to support the national Smart Meter roll-out.
- **UX Designer at Scenestealer** (2012 – 2012)
- **User Interface Designer at Relentless Software** (2008 – 2009)
- **UX Strategist & Designer at Eurosky** (2026 – present)
  Leading UX design for a social platform built around EU data rights and protections. Work spans participation and publishing tools, with particular focus on giving users clear visibility and control over their networks, content, and activity data.
- **Designer at Ultramarine Ltd.** (2007 – 2008)
- **Design Intern at Huguenot Design Ltd.** (1996 – 1997)
- **Staff Product Designer at Morressier** (2022 – 2025)
  Enabling scholars to publish and distribute peer-reviewed research of the highest integrity efficiently, at scale. —  In this role, I worked both strategically and hands-on with product managers, engineers, data scientists, executive stakeholders and publishing partners, in an agile, cross-functional service design and product development process to deliver better outcomes for our expert users.
  
  Key research and design work included:
  \* Enterprise Publishing Service ('Proceedings' and 'Journals')
  \* Online Conferences
  \* Research Libraries
  \* Research Discovery
  \* Author Verification
  \* 'Alembic' Design System
  
  I also support business success by:
  \* Supporting from Seed to Series B, leading to Acquisition
  \* Developing product design strategy
  \* Growing a design team from 2 to 10
  \* Operationalising participatory design practices and tools
  \* Maturing agile cross-functional processes and rituals
- **Strategic Design Partner at Thomas Kuhn Foundation** (2025 – present)
  Accelerate breakthroughs by making cutting-edge science more discoverable and measurable. Shape the Foundation’s design and product strategy to ensure paradigm-shifting research is visible and actionable for researchers, funders, and policymakers. Guide the development of science intelligence platforms, including the KGX3 Engine and Preprint Watch, to highlight emerging breakthroughs and help stakeholders measure and act on them.
- **Senior Interaction Designer at UK Home Office** (2016 – 2017)
  Supporting foreign nationals to access more efficient, ethical and humane visa and immigration services when seeking to live and work in the UK. — As a Service Designer on the UK visas and immigration digital transformation team, I collaborated with user researchers, interaction designers, engineers and civil servants to improve caseworker decision-making capabilities with secure, efficient and effective tools, processes and realtime data assets, through an agile participatory design process, compliant with UK government's digital service standards.
  
  This was a hybrid role that also involved significant hands-on interaction design, prototyping and testing with service users.
- **UX Strategist & Designer at Innnit** (2026 – present)
  Leading design on civic participation tools for German citizens: petitions, initiatives, and the infrastructure that makes them usable and accessible to everyone. Responsible for end-to-end design across participation flows, with a focus on accessibility and usability for a broad public audience.

## Education

- **Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology** — National Diploma, Scuplture (1997 – 2001)
- **Coláiste an Chraoibhín** — Leaving Certificate (1992 – 1995)
- **Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology** — Bachelor of Fine Arts, Experimental Digital Media (2002 – 2003)

## Skills

- Digital Transformation
- Team Leadership
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Agile Methodologies
- Strategic Leadership
- Product Development
- Product Strategy
- Product Design
- Interaction Design
- Service Design
- Design Systems
- Information Architecture
- Accessibility
- Prototyping
- Content Design
- UX Design
- Design Leadership
- Strategic Communication
- Usability
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- UI Design
- Mentoring
- Generative AI
- Design Operations
- User Research
- Analytics
- Design Strategy
- Design Thinking
- Systems Thinking
- Outcome-Driven Design
- AT Protocol

## Certifications

- Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) — Adobe
- Advanced Video Editing — Galway Film Centre

## Publications

- W Social and the ancient art of neighbourliness — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3movp4n7tgc2e)
- W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent.  — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3mokohkfb4224)
- Splitting Atoms & Splitting Hairs — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3mnxjmjjyyc2y)
- The Atmosphere needs a front door — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3mlv5oijn5s2q)
- The value is in the difficulty — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3mlsbz7j5rc2z)
- Slow down to speed up — codesign.leaflet.pub (https://codesign.leaflet.pub/3mithqf3rik2p)
- The only universal skill is being able to roll with the changes. — codesign.leaflet.pub (https://codesign.leaflet.pub/3mitfv4q5jc2d)
- Interaction Costs: The High Price of Low Usability — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3mhd6nfyhtc2z)
- I work, I think?  — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3mgigxmbx4k2z)
- to repeat is to recollect — minuslistens.leaflet.pub (https://minuslistens.leaflet.pub/3mdlgaogjmc2t)
- Stop asking users what they want — and start watching what they do. — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m75kss5jfs2z)
- A beginner's workflow for Lexicons development in AT protocol web apps — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3m67zsjevm227)
- I just can't shake this feeling... — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3m5nwmismdk2q)
- Why I started building Lanyards — marginalia.leaflet.pub (https://marginalia.leaflet.pub/3m5ns4innec2x)
- I made 2 extensions for Semble: Add new Cards in Google Chrome, then recall them with Raycast  — marginalia.leaflet.pub (https://marginalia.leaflet.pub/3m5gcukfzhc2p)
- Integrating your Atmosphere account content in your web projects — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3m56tzfj5pc2a)
- KGX3 can predict paradigm shifts long before the 'Impact Factor' and citations catch up. — marginalia.leaflet.pub (https://marginalia.leaflet.pub/3m4qddsoe2s2p)
- Announcing "AT Scholarly Lexicons": A blueprint for decentralised scholarly communication using the AT Protocol — marginalia.leaflet.pub (https://marginalia.leaflet.pub/3m4nfm5q4es2s)
- AT Protocol is a game-changer for scholarly communication and academic publishing. — marginalia.leaflet.pub (https://marginalia.leaflet.pub/3m4nbg4bh422g)
- A call for collaborators to experiment with AT Protocol for open research. — marginalia.leaflet.pub (https://marginalia.leaflet.pub/3m4knmtqmt227)
- The biggest ROI from design systems comes from engineering efficiencies, not design consistencies. — measuringdesign.leaflet.pub (https://measuringdesign.leaflet.pub/3m3fvyo3ftk2t)
- The point is to understand — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m3cld6zlcc2l)
- Fidelity scales inline with certainty — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m2yaaylaes2c)
- The AI recruitment ouroboros — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m2vr4zm3xk2n)
- Feast on the Feed of Feeds 🍢 — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3m2tlgdxp3k2s)
- How I make my feeds, easy peasy — wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub (https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3m2tirtrvzs2n)
- The worst designer I've ever worked with was also the most productive — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m2qmhm7kcc2l)
- Bring squiggle birds to your workshops — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m2oiebmouk26)
- The product designer's paradox — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m2mel6p4qc2l)
- Business leaders don’t care about design (and that’s a good thing) — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m2dzi6sgis2l)
- Incentives eat your strategy for lunch — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m2bwbvmnw22o)
- Equity compensation: a lottery ticket with terrible odds — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3m24fqoisbs2n)
- Founders: The best predictor of your SaaS failing is visualising your future too soon — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3lzlf5lrlps2f)
- Ghost kitchens in academia: How AI wrapper products threaten research integrity — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3lzg6eptz5c2l)
- The AI Bubble: Efficiency Theatre at Scale — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3lzdifns2ac2e)
- AI in Peer Review: Heuristics for Academic Publishers — renderghost.leaflet.pub (https://renderghost.leaflet.pub/3lz7q5vfxas2u)

## Volunteering

- Film & TV Editing at Foroige

## Languages

- English (native)
- German (limited_working)
- Irish (native)

## Other profiles

- linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrymprendergast/
- github: https://github.com/renderghost
- website: https://renderg.host/
- website: https://cal.com/renderghost