Chris Chapman

Chris, now 46, was brought up in rural Wiltshire. Having dropped out of a school he dismisses as ‘appallingly useless’ he fell back on one of his few options at the time – a talent for drawing.

Art was in his blood, evidently; his father was a technical illustrator and he describes his grandfather as ‘an incredibly eccentric bloke…every wall of his house was painted with scenes depicting the seven deadly sins – mostly lust, to be honest.’ He also discovered early a head for business, hiring coaches and selling tickets to school chums for trips to London.

The two aspects didn’t merge for a while; in the meantime he cultivated his artistic side on a Fine Art course at Exeter College of Art. ‘That was a brilliant time. You got technical support but you had to find your own materials. I tried everything there; by the end I was making ceramic sound-powered mechanical sculptures which told a story, sometimes involving video and stills – about the only thing I didn’t do was print-making.’

Chris left knowing that he couldn’t make money out of Fine Art; but he could make technical things – specifically, special effects. ‘I trawled my portfolio around London. I was a really lucky and persistent little swine; I just accepted the fact that you get loads of refusals and kept knocking on doors for weeks and weeks until I got my first bit of work. And after that, I didn’t stop.’
A component here for a Dr Who Cyberman, a title sequence there for Top of the Pops…Keen on comedy, his first big break came doing most of the effects for Alexei Sayle’s first TV series. And an even bigger break followed when he met a man with Peter Fluck’s phone number ‘and blagged my way into a job with Spitting Image.’

Within three months Chris was running the engineering workshop; within a year he was on the creative team, developing the kind of advanced robotic and computer control systems that could send an all-talking, all-moving Ronald Reagan careering up the road in a bathchair. He says: ‘No other job’s been quite as exciting; there are only so times you can blow up the Prime Minister’s head in front of 3000 people at a live performance without getting a bit drunk on it.’

I was designing bits and pieces for the astronauts to play around with on the space shuttle, but transferred pretty quickly to a team developing equipment for people with disabilities. I ran that for about three years; we created various bits of quite useful kit, which was good for the heart and the soul.

After four intoxicating years Chris was approached to apply those skills at an institute for bio-engineering. ‘I was designing bits and pieces for the astronauts to play around with on the space shuttle, but transferred pretty quickly to a team developing equipment for people with disabilities. I ran that for about three years; we created various bits of quite useful kit, which was good for the heart and the soul.’

But his entrepreneurial side was by now itching to get creative too.

Chris and his long-time collaborator Dave Sandbach launched into business in 1998, with credit cards for finance and the dashboard of his elderly Saab as an office. ‘Personally, I do anything a lot better when I do it with some one else, and it is a great partnership. Dave eats detail, but he points out that I don’t have the attention span!’

They developed the technologies for a ‘smart fabric’; working out the conductive pathways in the weaving process to create the equivalent of a touchpad and developing the chip to activate it.
The potential for this ‘ElekTex’ material was clearly enormous; they could see applications as roll-up keyboards for mobiles and PDA’s, hospital bedsheets that could monitor a patient’s heath, toys, programmable car seats…It was very smart stuff, but they were also smart enough to know that to be successful, they not only had to create clever things – they also had to be able to attract the investment to develop and sell them. Chris sought out a retired venture capitalist who coached him in presenting the right persona and writing business plans.
He had a natural aptitude. ‘I ended up doing a lot more of the businessy stuff because there aren’t that many people around who can look at creative projects, see what the opportunities are, where the money could be made, talk to the money guys and hopefully, make it all work.’

It was a tricky time to be starting out, with the dot.com boom imploding, but over a couple of years they attracted a phenomenal £14 million in investment and their company Eleksen, based at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, took off like a rocket. It quickly became the world leader in touch-sensitive interactive textiles.

They impressed not only with their ‘Man Machine Interface’ science, but also with their design aesthetic – the legacy of a fine art background. Chris says: ‘Engineers tend to want to do something clever, and the end user gets what they are given. We designed things to look right and work right, and buried the technology.’ The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired their products for its permanent collection and they also featured in the “Great Expectations” international touring exhibition of contemporary British design, organised by the Design Council in 2002.

Eleksen was soon employing around 40 staff, they were turning away multinational corporations eager to work with them, and Chris was spending every third day to and fro through airports to suppliers and customers in Europe, the US and Far East.

But in 2003 Chris quit the company. ‘I’d spent five years living on planes, and I’d promised my wife Sue at the beginning that I wouldn’t do more than that. I was exhausted and Dave and I had grown the business to a point where we were expendable.
‘So it was a chance to get some of the value out and get a life back.’

It gives off the constant vibe that design is respected, that it has value and worth, and that we’re doing it properly. I think it does people a real service to get exposed to that kind of thinking because it builds a critical mass of confidence.

Chris Chapman speaking about Dott Cornwall

Chris, Sue and their three children headed for the beach; firstly, on holiday to Australia and California…and then more permanently to Cornwall, in pursuit of that less pressurised life and a surfer’s tan.
Chris became a part-time Business Fellow at University College Falmouth and envisaged filling the rest of his time advising and supporting a few select local companies.
Then, while environmentally retrofitting the family’s converted barn in Godolphin Cross the concept of developing Cloud Nine eco-homes came to the fore remains another full-time pre-occupation (see Cloud Nine case study).

Meanwhile, he was getting involved in the local design community and helped found the Cornwall Design Forum. He’d also worked with the Design Council in the past, as a technology mentor offering advice on the development of products - and when Dott Cornwall was mooted, he was an immediate champion, joining the advisory panel.

‘It’s brilliant. I was really keen for it to happen here because it brings a really professional, international structure to doing some projects, coming at them a different way and with different design thinking - which raises the game of the people who get involved. They won’t forget it - particularly the interns, who’ll carry this experience forward,’ he says, adding: ‘It gives off the constant vibe that design is respected, that it has value and worth, and that we’re doing it properly. I think it does people a real service to get exposed to that kind of thinking because it builds a critical mass of confidence. On the co-design side it is an opportunity to get to a much bigger community and involve many more people.

‘There is huge potential in this; I think Dott is a big win as it also helps raise the profile of Cornwall as well – because there’s no doubt it is a quite different place from the rest of England.’