Biography
Currently an Associate Lecturer in Engineering Design and Innovation and Enterprise Lead at Edinburgh Napier University. As well as teaching design and communication skills to students throughout their first four years, Norman has helped to establish the student-run Engineering Society and has introduced students to companies and organisations for design projects. He is looking to assist in “productising” research being developed and taking relevant projects through to commercialisation.
Norman is an experienced, innovative and entrepreneurial Product Designer who has worked freelance, in-house and co-founded two successful product design consultancies, both of which went on to receive substantial funding to design and develop own products.
Norman co-founded Incorporated Technologies Limited (ITL). ITL developed many products for companies, from cervical smear scanning instruments to hand-held controllers for under water robotic cameras. Norman 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. The company received substantial investment to develop the kiosk product and this became one of the main focuses of the business, with Virgin being a major customer. During his time at ITL, he designed two versions of the ‘BT Smartspace Workstations of the Future’ with colleague Ian Hynd, a future co-founder of Harris Hynd Limited. One workstation was the product highlighted at midnight during the London Millennium Dome celebrations for the year 2000.
Subsequently Norman went on to form Harris Hynd Limited, as Design & Product Development Director. While providing a design service designing a range of products, from audio information signage 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 was used in all the WoWee audio products and the speaker technology is in the Sony Museum.
Norman has continued to assist companies developing new products.