Work experience

 

Senior Manager, Front End Innovation & Design

April 2009 – Present (4 years 11 months) Lund, Sweden

 

Chris' role has been to apply strategic design methods to feed the innovation pipeline with relevant breakthrough concepts that have a potential to deliver new & significant business value. A member of the R&D innovation management team, He contributes to the organizational and process design of an internal innovation group where he champions user driven innovation as ‘one way to do it'.

 

From the bottom up he built and directed an internal strategic design group of 10 designers, whose individual development, goals & objectives he is also accountable for. In parallel, He manages a consultancy budget by assigning projects to external design partners globally. He leads creative problem solving for all concept development and is accountable for the team’s output. Some of the team's most notable achievements to date have been:

• Development of a customer co-innovation process for & creative leadership of pilots with key strategic customers such as PepsiCo, Nestle & Meiji Japan

• Development of a brand design service for customers in developing markets & creative leadership of pilots in collaboration with commercial partners

• UX & brand design strategy for Tetra Pak product family

• Definition and ‘selling in’ of future visions for Carton packaging industry

 

 

Manager, Strategy and Innovation, ReD Associates

​October 2006 – February 2009 (2 years 5 months) Copenhagen, Denmark

 

Leading multi-competence teams with backgrounds in design, social science and business development, Chris directed global design strategy projects for clients such as Samsung, Lego & Beiersdorf - supporting in-house R&D groups primarily to develop qualitative product insights and translate them into new product concepts relevant to their business needs.

 

Activities included defining and managing global qualitative research studies, insight development, facilitating ideation and creative problem solving sessions, and visualization and prototyping of business concepts.

 

Senior Product Designer, Nokia

​August 2004 – September 2006 (2 years 2 months) Copenhagen, Denmark

 

Chris was assigned to both strategic and tactical design activities.

 

Strategic:

In support of the Insight and Innovation group, Chris was assigned to lead the creative development of new technology concepts. For example, He was tasked to design new and relevant mobile device applications for capacitive touch and motion sensor technologies. In this instance, the project was one if the first within Nokia R&D to apply experience prototyping methods as a way of selling-in new product experiences.

 

Tactical: 

Chris acted as the design lead within a number of end to end development projects, liasing primarily between marketing and R&D within cross functional teams. His role was to deliver the Industrial Design for the device, (where he sought to strike the right balance between usability, technical feasibilty and elegance) and work within a cross-functional team to translate the design intent into a viable technical and commercial proposition (and protect that intent from pruning as the project moved through the stage gate process)

 

 

Product Interaction Designer, Lego

 

​August 2003 – July 2004 (1 year) Billund, Denmark

 

Assigned to the Concept Lab, Chris developed front-end concepts for smart toys. The objective was to identify relevant applications for low cost technologies that would create new value for the Lego portfolio. For example, acting as experience design lead on one very challenging project, he collaborated with a team of firmware and hardware engineers to develop and prototype a family of wirelessly connected bricks for a potential next generation Mindstorms product. 

 

 

Product Designer, Audi AG

June 2002 – August 2003 (1 year 3 months) Ingolstadt, Germany

 

Chris was hired to design exterior and interior trim details for the Audi TT, A4, Q7 and RS8. For example he was assigned to explore ways in which LEDs could be gradually integrated into car design without compromising Audi’s signature visual design language. This was done over a period of time during which he designed headlights for a number of show cars including the Audi Pikes Peak and Le Man.

 

 

Product Interaction Designer, Casio US R&D Center

 

June 2000 – June 2002 (2 years 1 month) San Jose, CA

 

Based in Silicon Valley California, Casio US R&D consisted of a team of designers, researchers and business deveopers, working on the ideation and strategic direction of next generation Casio products and services that would capture the US and European markets. Casio wanted to do this by building strategic alliances with the content providers in the bay area in order to co-develop internet enabled devices that built upon Casio’s hardware capabilities. Examples of project Chris worked on:

 

• Flash Watch: Leveraging Casio’s heritage in watch and display manufacturing, we intiiated an alliance with Macromedia to built a Flash enabled watch.

• Event Watch: In collbaoration with Michael Jackson for his forthcoming world tour, we explored the idea of an event watch that would interact in real time to live music events.

• Disney Watch: In collaboration with Disney, a watch that would interact within its theme parks.

• MyCasio.com: A content management tool for owners of the casio’s PDA, The Cassiopeia

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Structural Packaging Designer, PI Cubed London

June 1996 – January 1998 (1 year 8 months) London, United Kingdom

 

Chris designed structural packaging solutions for companies within the food, healthcare and beauty markets.

 

 

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