An experienced, innovative and entrepreneurial Product Designer who has worked as a freelance product designer, in-house designer and co-founder of two successful product design consultancies.
Edinburgh Napier University
Currently, Norman is an Associate Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University. As well as teaching design and communication skills to students throughout their first four years, as academic lead, he has helped to establish the university Formula Student Team. This has been a great success in a relatively short period of time. Norman is also the Innovation Lead for the Mountain Bike Centre of Scotland and is assisting in the development of the Cycling Innovation Centre in Innerleithen. In addition, he helped in the design of the PINND pedal.
Over 30 years of design working on consumer, engineering and medical products:
He was involved in working freelance for Spider Systems, when they set up, designing the first SpiderMonitor and SpiderPort. He also designed a number of high profile products with his freelance company NRH Industrial Design. In the 1990s, he co-founded Incorporated Technologies Limited (ITL) and designed the ePoint kiosk, one of the first interactive Internet kiosks to be built with flat screen technology and in slim-line form – at only 74mm deep. It was installed in all the UK Virgin Record stores. The company received substantial investment to develop the kiosk product and this became a main focus of the business. During his time at ITL, he designed two versions of the ‘BT Smartspace Workstations of the Future’ with Ian Hynd, a future co-founder of Harris Hynd Limited. One work-station was the product highlight – at midnight – of the central exhibition at the London Millennium Dome celebrations in the year 2000.
Later, Norman went on to form Harris Hynd Limited, as Design & Product Development Director. While a range of products, from ride-on lawnmowers to animal tracking devices, both founders invented and patented exciting and unique Gel Audio™ loudspeaker technology. The company received substantial investment to develop this technology, changing its name to SFX Technologies Ltd in 2003. The unique technology is now used in all the WoWee products.
Norman’s strengths are his entrepreneurial and creative skills and his ability to take new and existing technology and match it to product concepts and applications.