Biography

I was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland, but grew up in Canberra, Australia and it was there that I graduated in Industrial Design, in 1992. I pursued a combination of design and IT work for nine years before moving with my wife to London in 2001. At that time, my work had been moving away from visual and tangible design pursuits and towards web programming, but this was to change when I became the designer at the Wallace Collection. The Wallace Collection is a UK national museum Located in Marylebone London. In 2002 when I joined, it was a small institution with around 80 staff and a static collection of around 5000 objects. Its scale gave me scope to work on all aspects of design in a museum context. I redesigned several interior spaces, designed display cases and display systems, exhibition design, graphic design, web design, advertising, and photography. The breadth of work was great, but the organisation was also unavoidably institutional in its approach to design, which I found creatively limiting. In 2005 I moved on to AH-HA design, my vehicle into freelance design and making.

Work

AH-HA design produces products for domestic interiors, with a particular focus on lighting. AH-HA Design's other strands are web and print design.

Frame wall light
Frame is a picture frame / lightbox / wall light.
The top section of the frame lifts off to reveal 3 sandwiches of 2mm float glass. The glass can be slid out to replace what is framed by the light. Place objects of the moment into the 3 layers of Frame to change its character altogether.

The frame is made from plantation softwood & can be painted to your specifications.

The back is clear-anodised aluminium.

The light source is a single 12V 20W halogen bulb.

Includes electronic transformer.

Can be wired into a dimming circuit.

Frame hangs like a picture frame from an ordinary countersunk screw or a nail in your wall.

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Stack ceiling light
It might look like a computer rendering - but it's real!

When the light is off, Stack's external helical form comes to the fore.

When the light is on, the interior ellipsoid void becomes apparent. Because it casts an interesting wash of light and shadow it's ideally suited to smaller areas like halls and stairwells.

The form, though simple in concept, is complex in reality. Stack changes considerably depending on your viewing angle.

Stack is lit by a standard 60-100W bayonet bulb.

The model shown is painted board but is also available in acrylic.

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AH-HA design website
E-commerce enabled data driven website with bespoke content management system. Written in PHP/MySQL. The site's front end is built in flash & html. Dynamic flash elements like the navigation menu are built from CMS data.

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Copyright 2004 AH-HA design.