I'm Phil Wornath, an Innovation & Experience Designer. Born in Germany and having lived across Europe, I bring a multicultural perspective to my work. My core philosophy is simple: technology should serve humanity, not the other way around.

Design Engineer | Phil Wornath

Brenda Laurel, PhD

What I do

Three fixed-scope offers. Pricing on request.

Selected work

Three recent projects. The full deck, including client work, is on the projects page.

2026
Product
UX Design
Full-Stack
AI Summary Helper
Open-source reading assistant for Chrome, Firefox and Android, in 24 languages
Summarize any page with the model you choose, from OpenAI to a fully local Ollama. Ask follow-ups that quote the page, keep a searchable library on your device and send a digest to your Kindle. No account needed.
Role: Product, UX / UI, developmentTeam: Solo project: B2C, scaling towards B2G
Website Chrome Web Store GitHub
2025
Frontend
Scrollytelling
Merkle Arc
Website launch / development
During a staffing shortage in the software development unit, I took the development lead of the Merkle Arc website launch in October 2025. Closely together with UI designers and project managers I developed and shipped the new landing page. Lighthouse: 100 performance, 96 accessibility, 96 best practices, 100 SEO.
Role: Frontend DeveloperTeam: Marco Hauri (project lead), Marco Becker (creative director), Alexander Metz (UX/UI), Armin Wurmser, Thomas Walter
2023
UX Design
AI Prototyping
Full-Stack
SmoothRide
InfrastructureGPT: civic tech from a single photo
A mobile-first civic tech platform enabling citizens to report and reimagine cycling infrastructure using just a photo. Combining AI insights, object detection and contextual interaction design, SmoothRide lowers barriers to participation and turns cyclists into co-creators of better public spaces. It is live at smoothri.de.
Role: Product, AI & data full-stack developer (M.A. project)Team: Solo project, heading towards B2G
Visit SmoothRide Project page

What I care aboutWhat Drives MeAlternative Job Titles

ExplorerTinkererTeacherIndie HackerCommunity BuilderOpen Source AdvocateDigital Nomad

FAQ

01Who are you?

02What do you do for work?

03What's your professional background?

04What are your core skills?

What is your mission?

My mission is to build sustainable, inclusive, and human-centered solutions aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Primary Focus: Sustainable Cities & Mobility (SDG 11) and Climate Action (SDG 13).

I also champion open-source tech (SDG 9), digital accessibility (SDG 8), and responsible consumption (SDG 12). I'm deeply committed to climate mitigation, offsetting over 26 tonnes of CO2e through solar, peatland, and methane avoidance projects via Ecologi. Ultimately, I want to build regenerative, transparent systems that empower users.

What languages do you speak?

🇩🇪 German (Native / C2), 🇬🇧 English (Fluent / C2), 🇳🇱 Dutch (Intermediate / B2), and 🇪🇸 Spanish (Basic / A2). This multicultural background helps me design for diverse, global audiences.

What drives you outside of work?

I'm driven by global collaboration, DIY culture, community building, and sustainable living. I'm a massive advocate for cycling and sustainable transport. I also love reading and pet-sitting—which actually led me to create Petset.life for digital nomads!

Are you open to speaking engagements or collaborations?

Absolutely. I actively participate in the tech and design community, from BBC documentaries to sustainability hackathons and industry meetups. I'm always eager to connect with fellow designers, developers, and civic tech enthusiasts. Reach out if you'd like to collaborate or chat!

What's your approach to design?

I balance deep technical knowledge with a research-driven, human-centered process. I like to 'design beyond the screen,' meaning I focus on the real-world impact of digital products—whether that’s improving cycling infrastructure, creating accessible interfaces, or exploring how AI can enhance human capabilities without replacing them.

What projects are you working on right now?

Currently, I'm building Petset.life (a platform-agnostic pet-sitting network) and AI Summary Helper (a Chrome extension for content summarization). I'm also exploring sustainable co-living concepts, contributing to open-source projects, and researching the intersection of AI, mobility, and community building.

Have you built a design system before?

Yes — a 2025 project for a nonprofit research network. I was UI Engineer / Token Architect in a design team (with a software architect and fellow designers) building a design system for three affiliated organizations: 170 components and 350+ variables built on a three-layer token architecture (primitives → semantic → component), so the same button component reskins correctly across three completely different brand palettes without a single hardcoded value.

Do you have finance or fintech UX experience?

Yes — a 2025 website relaunch for a Swiss pension provider, together with a PM and a frontend developer. My part was UX / UI: we rebuilt the information architecture around stage-based flows with progressive disclosure, and I designed a portfolio allocation module that pairs a color-coded donut chart with an interactive breakdown table — built specifically to make a genuinely complex financial distribution readable at a glance instead of overwhelming.

What does "Design Engineer" actually mean in your work?

It means I don't hand off and walk away. On a pension-provider relaunch I worked UX/UI through developer handoff directly with the frontend team. On a multi-brand design system project my role was literally UI Engineering — building the token architecture developers implement against, not just the visual layer. This site is the same practice applied to my own work: I designed and built its SSR architecture, accessibility pass, and interaction system myself.

Have you worked on sustainability or climate-related products?

Three different angles, actually. Toogethr (2021, my graduation internship at the Utrecht commuting start-up) tackled the post-pandemic return to solo car commuting: I developed concepts for their social cycling ecosystem, built out as a smart bicycle bell — nudges like "one of your colleagues is leaving, wanna join?" turned commuting into a habit through social proof, not guilt. Deutsche Bahn (2022–23) had me researching bike-rail intermodality with the product team and pitching contextual parking/incentive features at their internal Rad+ Hackathon. A global energy technology company (2024) is the industrial end of the same thread — a CO2 calculator that lets plant operators compare turbine setups by emissions reduction, hydrogen flow, and cost savings before committing to hardware.

Have you worked on GovTech or public-sector AI?

Yes — a 2025 prototype for a Swiss municipality's public services: a multilingual, LLM-powered front desk that understands everyday questions in German, French, Italian, English, or Ukrainian even when they don't match a government site's exact keyword index, and returns real deep-links and checklists instead of a dead end. We pitched it with a PM leading the project; I built the prototype with v0 and Google Gemini, fed the municipality's actual sitemap and service structure. Worth being precise about the numbers: the projected 40% cut in tier-1 support inquiries is a GovTech benchmark estimate from the pitch, not a measured production result yet.

What's your actual process on a UX project?

An energy-sector website refresh is the clearest example: I work low-fidelity wireframes → mid-fidelity prototypes, occasionally into high-fidelity when a pattern genuinely needs it — shaping user flows and validating interaction patterns before they go to full visual design, not after. That sequencing is deliberate: it's cheaper to be wrong about a flow at wireframe stage than to discover it in a finished mock.

Where does AI actually show up in your work, versus just being a buzzword?

Before it was the current AI wave: at Deutsche Bahn in early 2023 I ran internal advisory sessions on ChatGPT and LLMs for the product team — "KI, Kollege" ("AI, Colleague") — covering ideation workflows, customer insight generation, UX writing support, and prototyping automation, for a product/marketing audience that wasn't yet using these tools day to day. The AI search box on this page is the current version of that same instinct: use the tool where it earns its place, not because it's trending.

You

Let's have a conversation!

Do you prefer to work async or do you have questions?
Then leave me an e-mail by phil@philwornath.com and I will get back to you asap.

Phil Wornath

Now you know what I am doing right now. Want to see my actual projects?

What I do

Accessibility Gap Audit

Human-Centered AI Architecture

Sustainable Web & Carbon Audit

Selected work

AI Summary Helper

Merkle Arc

SmoothRide

FAQ

Born to build bridges

Let's have a conversation!

Phil Wornath — Home

Phil Wornath

Now you know what I am doing right now. Want to see my actual projects?

What I do

Accessibility Gap Audit

Human-Centered AI Architecture

Sustainable Web & Carbon Audit

Selected work

AI Summary Helper

Merkle Arc

SmoothRide

FAQ

Born to build bridges

Let's have a conversation!