SPARKinteractive side of four lunar landing exhibits. You
touch something and then it lights up and plays video,
or you put an RFID tag on something and it plays
audio into a specific space. We do all the electronic
side of that.
“Patrick’s a design engineer; his degree was in
automotive engineering and structures, and he’s
migrated into this field of electronics. My background
is in textile design; I do a lot of the creative design.
Made Invaders, for
example, is my design,
and then Patrick works
on how to make it
function. I don’t know
much about the
electronics, but I do
know what they should
look like: the design
rigour that needs to go
into things. We have quite a nice partnership of skills.
“We’ve got a product designer now who does all
the CAD for us and makes everything look good. It’s
nice to have people to support us. When it was just
the two of us, Patrick was doing the electronics and
the software, and we’ve now got a software engineer
and a product engineer as well.
“Gradually, we just built up and built up. We’re doing
much bigger projects now, still working with the
Environment Agency. We didn’t go to the makerspace
to design a product to then start a business out of it;
we’ve formed a business within the makerspace,
providing a complementary skill to some of the other
people that were there. We’ve grown from there over
the last five years. It’s been serendipitous.
“A lot of it’s been driven by Patrick and his interest
in new problems. One of the things that stands out
for us, as a business, is that we’re willing to take a
punt with a client. Even if we don’t know how
something works, we know that it must be possible.
Whereas we know that a
lot of businesses, unless
it fits into their formula,
they won’t be willing to
take it on. It comes back
to the time when we
wanted a prototype- there was no-one who
was willing to do a proof
of concept, or a
prototype. ‘No, we don’t want to make one of
something; if you want 10,000, come back.’
“I think our biggest run has been 200 things for a
client. If you go to somewhere that’s got the big
pick-and-place machines, and ask them to make you
200 of something, they’ll tell you it’s not worth their
time to set up the machines to do that. We can
manufacture things in small runs that big places just
don’t want to do. It’s almost like the bigger the
company, the less likely they are to want to deal with
you. We try to fill that void.”
Above^
“Sometimes people
will go to other
companies with ideas
but aren’t able to get
exactly what they
want; they’ll come to
us, and we’re often
aISe to MuSfiS what that
person wants”We’re doing much
bigger projects now,
still working with the
Environment Agency
”
”