College Position

Director of Studies in Engineering, Director of Studies in Manufacturing Engineering, Tutor for Rooms 

University Position

Associate Professor in Engineering Design; Director of Graduate Education for the School of Technology 

University Department

Engineering

Research Interests

Engineering and Product Design

You hail from the North, but you called the Midlands home for a long time. Where did your interest in design and engineering start? 

I grew up in Hull, in an area that in the 1970s still showed the scars of bombing from the Second World War. As a youngster, my main ambitions were to either play football like John Robertson (Nottingham Forest) or to draw for the Beano. I went to Kelvin Hall Senior School and like many kids who enjoy art but are also good at maths and physics, I was encouraged to specialise in the more technical subjects. My combination of Maths, Physics and Technical Drawing at A-Level led naturally to Mechanical Engineering which I studied at Loughborough University. I was fortunate to be sponsored by Rank Taylor Hobson (RTH) who also provided my work placements during industrial terms and holidays. This funded my first car, a British Racing Green Morris Marina Coupe. After four years of hard sums, my creative urges needed an outlet and I gave up a job offer at RTH to study an MA in Industrial Design at (what was then) Leicester Polytechnic. This led to a job in Sheffield for a year or so before returning to RTH in Leicester where I designed measuring instruments and optical equipment.

Your job in Leicester led you to some exceptional achievements. You have both an Oscar and an Emmy. Can you tell us how this came about?

I was very lucky that for many years I worked as an engineer and project manager developing new lenses for the movie industry. I won my Oscar, the ‘Scientific and Technical Academy Award’, presented by Salma Hayek in a ceremony in LA in 2000, specifically for mechanical engineering on a new range of fixed focal length (prime) lenses, excitingly called the Cooke S4 lenses. The firm had not developed new lenses like these for over 30 years and we had to learn from scratch how to do it. The lenses had lots of novel mechanical features to make the life of the cinematographer easier. They also had extraordinary optical performance, working at a very wide aperture. They launched to the market in 1999 and have been used to make hundreds of films since then. 

So with a career established in Hollywood and engineering, how did you enter academia? 

After 10 years in industry, I fancied a change! I saw a research job at the Institute for Manufacturing which was in partnership with the Royal College of Art to help small companies design better products. It had my name on it. It also allowed me to study for my PhD (Churchill). I was very fortunate that completing my PhD and ending my research contract coincided with a vacancy to teach design. 

And today, you work primarily in teaching. Did you always want to enter teaching?

I became a Lecturer in 2005 and joined Selwyn in 2006 after being courted by Ken Wallace. I had other options, but Selwyn was the only serious contender! Over the last (nearly) 20 years I have been lucky to supervise a lot of fabulous PhD students, with topics as varied as: measuring the economic impact of design; sustainable packaging design and more recently the dimensional precision of 3D printing. Designers face new challenges to adapt to a world where we need to consume and produce less. My real passion has been developing how we teach design to our manufacturing engineering students and the highlight of every year is a public design show where we are proud to showcase their work. 

Outside academia, how do you spend your time?

Outside of my work, I am a carer for a fabulous youngster with additional needs. I would ideally spend more time gardening and maybe even doing a bit of painting now and then, but work and caring tends to dominate. I also still like to watch Nottingham Forest whenever I can.