Lorna is a trailblazer showing how design could be applied to “non-designery” problems like services and systems before it got fashionable. She has held creative leadership positions in a number of innovation groups in a range of sectors from technology to healthcare, and spent seven years in the Mayo Clinic implementing transformative, user-centric care models. She is heads the Dublin office of Fjord, an innovation consultancy. A long way from where she started in Fashion and Textiles in NCAD…or is it?

Lorna’s design career has been an remarkable journey spanning more than 25 years, with stops in the world of fashion, wearable technology and, most recently, health care. She is a futurist at heart, recognised for her ability to anticipate shifts in the social, cultural and economic context for design. She was one of the pioneering researchers to focus on wearable technologies and built a reputation for research activity in this arena.

She later identified the theme of health as an emerging arena for design to thrive. She founded and led the Human Wellbeing Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her vision was to employ human centred design principles to address the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry in delivering population health outcomes.

She recently returned to Ireland from the USA to take up the position as the Group Director at Fjord Dublin. As the Fjord studio in Dublin sits within a global Accenture centre for innovation, The Dock, Lorna has a unique role placing design at the heart of the multi-disciplinary teams working on R&D projects addressing some of the biggest challenges facing society today.