UX Designer · Brisbane, AU
Christopher
Hunter
ABOUT ME
I design products for specialists, researchers, and technical practitioners. Internal tools and complex software where the user knows what they're trying to do, and the design's job is to get out of their way.
For the last five years I've worked at Ura, a Berlin design agency in the internet freedom space: open-source projects and civic-interest tools where privacy, security, and accessibility aren't afterthoughts. The work has ranged from internet outage measurement and translation platforms to whistleblowing tools, research hubs, secure operating systems, and AI content classification. The common thread is software built to serve the public rather than monetise them.
I work as a generalist: research, IA, content strategy, UI, and the harder work of figuring out what a project actually needs before any of that. Smaller budgets and non-commercial clients have taught me where to focus and where to let things sit.
Now based in Brisbane after a decade overseas. Open to projects in Australia and abroad.
HOW I THINK
CHESTERTON'S FENCE
Every product has a history. The decisions that made it what it is were made by real people with real constraints at a specific moment in time. Before changing anything I want to understand that history — not to preserve it, but to know what I'm actually dealing with.
This is where most design projects go wrong. The surface problem gets solved and the underlying problem remains. I try to identify which problem is actually worth solving before committing to a direction.
Research is only useful if it leads somewhere. Feedback against a prototype is worth ten times the same conversation in the abstract. I figure out a direction and test it against something real.
SELECTED WRITING
URA DESIGN
The Data Breach Didn't Matter (and That's the Problem)
Why the most significant security failures aren't technical — and what that means for how we design for security behaviour.
URA DESIGN
Why 'Perfect' Security Is Perfectly Useless
The gap between what security tools can do and what users will actually do — and how design bridges that gap.
GEOCODE EARTH
The Exactitude of Postcodes
On the surprising complexity hidden inside postal addressing systems and what it reveals about how we model the world.