About
Graphic design to heat pumps, and the thread that runs through it.
I started in graphic design and ended up in home energy, which reads as drift until you look at what the jobs have in common. Every one of them has been about turning a complicated system into something a person will actually use. That is the whole thread, and I will not labour it.
I did an HND in Graphic Design at Gloucester College, then a BA in Product Design and an MA in Design Futures at Cardiff Metropolitan University, both firsts. I stayed on at PDR, the university's design research centre, where the work was turning design thinking methods into practical tools for designing public policy and public services. That put me in rooms with the European Central Bank, HMRC, Atradius, the Northern Ireland Civil Service and Scottish Enterprise, running workshops around the UK and Europe.
From 2017 to 2019 I did that on my own account as Mindfulness Design: organisational change work, delivered mostly through custom built tools and facilitation decks.
In 2019 I joined the Alacrity Foundation venture programme in Cardiff and co-founded Intuitix through it, graduating with the 2019/20 cohort. We incorporated in June 2020 after a £250k seed round, and I was a statutory director from August 2020 until March 2023. The product was B2B software for tracking KPIs and return on investment across portfolios of innovation projects, sold into water and gas networks. Having to build a thing and then sell it is a fast education in the distance between a good idea and something anyone will pay for.
After that came installHUB, product work on a green tech platform serving EV, solar, battery and heat pump installers. That is where the installer side of the energy transition stopped being an abstraction to me. Since 2024 I have been at Homely Energy, doing product for heat pump control software across hardware, firmware, mobile and web.
Outside work I am a co-founder and director of Unstable Arts, a community arts hub in Cardiff. Studios, event space, pottery through to textiles. It is a home for mildly unhinged creativity, and running it has taught me more about operations than any product role has. A kiln does not care about your roadmap.