The person who kept asking why buildings don't work like shows

I started playing instruments as a child — a lot of instruments, across a lot of styles. Classical, punk rock, Dixieland jazz, grunge, nineties metal. I was performing in different venues and different formats for most of my early life, and along the way I got deeply involved in the technical revolution that took music production and recording into the digital sphere.

Eventually I went to study technical theatre systems, mostly with an audio focus. That is where I crossed over to lighting — and my approach from the start was to treat it as playing another instrument in the band. Light was not illumination. It was a performative, expressive medium, another voice in the composition. That instinct came directly from music, and it set the trajectory for everything that followed.

I spent years touring — world tours with bands, national runs, then musicals and comedy and cabaret acts, which meant longer stays in each town and a deeper relationship with how an audience responds over time. From there I moved into permanent installations — Cirque du Soleil and similar productions where every sensory detail is orchestrated and refined nightly.

Throughout this work, under the New Illusions brand, I was drawn to emerging technologies and the challenge of repurposing existing tools in ways nobody had tried. That instinct for innovation — pushing what the technology could do, not just deploying it safely — became a defining thread.

Then I moved to Dubai, where I ended up working with Martin Professional, who had the strongest dynamic architectural and architainment product range in the industry. That was the bridge. I was upgrading facade systems originally designed by some of the best lighting designers in the world — replacing older platforms with LED, introducing video and pixel mapping, integrating new control systems. I also built up their local design department from essentially zero to a team of ten: 3D visualisers, dedicated CAD and project management staff, and several designers.

But working for a manufacturer means you can only design with the products you sell. I wanted to be product-agnostic. So I left to set up an independent design studio — initially as the lighting arm of WADG, an acoustics and audio consultancy run by my friend Michael, who has a genuinely unique understanding of sound and its relationship to space. Working inside an acoustics firm from day one meant that light and sound were designed together from the start. It was not a philosophy. It was the structure of the practice. Michael played a key role in developing the sensory design thinking that eventually became Emittiv's core identity.

After a couple of years embedded with WADG, I founded Emittiv — an independent consultancy spanning lighting, video, sound, scent, and control. The full sensory palette. Each chapter of my career had added a sense: music taught orchestration and dynamics, theatre taught narrative and precision, entertainment taught multi-sensory immersion, and architecture showed me how much of that knowledge the built environment was missing.

This site exists to establish sensory design as a recognised discipline within the built environment. Not a marketing term. Not a niche add-on. A real field of practice with its own body of knowledge, its own design methods, and its own seat at the table when buildings are conceived.

The ambition is straightforward: when a developer, an institution, or a design practice assembles a team for a significant project, sensory design should be on the list alongside architecture, interior design, lighting, and acoustics. Not because every project needs a dedicated sensory designer — but because every project should at least ask the question.

sensory.design is a resource for anyone who shares that conviction. Architects who want to push beyond visual composition. Interior designers who care about how a room feels to the body, not just the eye. Clients who know they want something more from their buildings but have not had a name for it. And entertainment designers who have always worked this way and wonder why buildings do not.

The expertise behind this site lives at Emittiv — an architectural lighting and sensory design consultancy based in Dubai, working internationally. But sensory.design is not a company website. It is an industry resource. The discipline is bigger than any one practice, and it needs a home that reflects that.