Polymorph develops digital products for a wide range of clients and partners, from big Fintech corporates to small startups and everything in between. We work mainly with mobile and IoT technologies. We usually work with partners to take a product or solution from concept to production. We have a highly talented team with a very diverse range of skills including visual and user experience design, product development, process management as well as development. I am mainly focussed on the early stages of the projects we work on, ensuring that the most appropriate design processes and principles are being followed, that the right information is being gathered and that the project is well defined. We wrap a lot of this up in a Sprint 0 process that kicks off each project. After everything is working well I step back into an oversight role, checking in regularly to make sure everything stays awesome. Throughout this I work on Information Architecture and design, user experience, visual and interaction design, alongside Polymorph’s amazing experts. I also work hard to encourage and enable close interdisciplinary collaboration within the team. My other primary focus is the continued leadership and development of Polymorph’s design team and capacity. As a director I am also keenly involved in business development and strategy, community building and marketing. Occasionally I still get to play with some real, hands-on design, which keeps me honest.

When I joined Polymorph, the company was exclusively focussed on development, with no internal visual or UI design capacity. I streamlined the development process by bringing these skills to the team, speeding up development and making the team more agile and less dependent on external stakeholders. I began championing UX, visual design and interaction design. It became clear to us that Polymorph needed a creative department and I moved into the CCO position as we grew the internal design team. I simultaneously worked on a series of small games, most notably a game called Fleet of One. These formed part of Polymorph’s first exploration of internal product development.

During my time at Iziko I designed and produced 14 exhibitions from concept to installation, as well as working on continuous maintenance and upgrades to various aspects of the Iziko Museums, with particular focus on the Iziko South African Museum. I had the privilege of working across Natural History, Social History and Art collections, as well as across multiple sites. I was able to work on an incredible variety of subjects and face new design challenges on every project. I created the spacial, visual and information design of exhibitions, worked out how specimens and objects would be displayed, designed multi-media installations, dioramas and interactive installations. I was also heavily involved in project management, budgeting and roadmap planning. I collaborated with curators, subject specialists and collections managers, and also managed installation teams and outsourcing of specialist production. Personally meaningful exhibitions:African Dinosaurs had the biggest budget and the longest development time of any project I produced for Iziko. It was also the last major project I worked on, meaning that it was a culmination of my skills and knowledge as an exhibition designer.Darwin in the Cape, as it was originally installed, gave me the freedom to formulate an exhibition that incorporated a complex information architecture that allowed visitors to navigate the exhibition in an extremely non-linear way, whilst simultaneously utilising the structure of the space as an aesthetic mechanism. During my time at the Iziko I began researching user testing and started prototyping exhibitions by creating 3D virtual walk throughs. I found ways to employ contemporary product, software and user experience design techniques within the museum scenario. My growing engagement with these techniques and my excitement with the growth of digital products brought me into a collaboration with Polymorph.

I began my time at the SANG as an assistant curator. I had got to know some of the team there through the exhibition I co-curated there, Soft Serve 2. I got to work on some fascinating and often profound exhibitions, including: Inferno and Paradiso, Trade Routes, Head North and a Broken Landscape: HIV/AIDS in Africa. The team at the SANG seems to like having me around, because as budgets ran out on certain projects they would find other ways to keep me involved. I never entirely stopped working on exhibitions, but my role did officially change and I got to work on other aspects of the museums, specifically focussing on developing their collection database and becoming their Publicist for a time. I would also often fix their computers, but that was never an official role.

After graduating UCT I found work in a variety of industries, including model building, film industry art department, web design and graphic design. During this time I also built a budget video editing system, a Pentium 3 PC running Windows 2000, something I was told was impossible. But it worked, slowly, and I made some money editing videos for a variety of clients, eventually upgrading my system and briefly producing corporate videos. Additionally I worked on several exhibition projects, including a series of events by a group called PM inc, two of the Public Eye initiated Soft Serve exhibitions and two video exhibitions, Straight to Video 1 and 2.