A Life in Design
My current incarnation as a furniture designer in Austin, Texas, is the latest phase of a career that began when I was a small boy with a fascination for how things work and a desire to take things apart to find out - a constant source of irritation for my parents, since I was rarely able to put them back together again the way I had found them. However, a journey of constant learning had begun and by the time I was 15, I knew what I wanted to do with my life...design cars! By the time I reached 19 I was enrolled on an Industrial design (transportation) course in the home of the once glorious British car industry, Coventry.
It was during those four years that I learned I was not actually a “petrol-head” and that my interest lay in people and the way they interact with the manufactured environment by which they are surrounded. I quickly realized that the real meaty problems in design are less about the object, and more about the person using it. As a result, I ended up working for Philips Design - one of the leading organizations in the world developing user-centered design concepts. For over 10 years, I was lucky enough to have worked in some of the top design offices in the world, and to have learned from some truly gifted practitioners.
Me, aged 4 with my grandmother.
The slideshow below provides a snapshot of some of the work I carried out during my 15 year stint in industry. Some of the work is purely conceptual and never saw the light of day on store shelves. Other projects are aimed squarely at the market, either consumer or business to business. They are a reflection of a life spent at the often stormy nexus where Art, Science and Engineering meet.
Along the way, I spent 13 years teaching Design in China, Vietnam and South Korea before I finally pitched up in Austin in June 2021.
Below is a small selection from the period where I worked as an industrial designer for Philips Design (The internal design consultancy of Philips Electronics) working in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Vienna, Austria.
Awards
1997 runner up Josef Binder Austrian Design Award
