alexheathreed.com
Alexander Heathcliff Reed
Welcome to (beta) pages showcasing Heaths work
Heath is a Design Researcher, Inventor, Designer and Educator specialising in multidisciplinary, socially inspired, participant informed product design. He has a long career in industrial and academic creative and technical practice working to identify and address real world challenges with viable final product offers in his role as Principal Industrial Designer and Research Fellow. Please use the buttons and links in text to navigate to examples of Heath work. You can view or download his CV here. For further information on projects or enquire about tutoring services contact Heath at alexheathreed@outlook.com. Click here for academic dissemination articles.
Experience
Heath has always been fascinated by creative and technical enterprise, and blurring the spaces between them. His early career (1985 to 1995) involved working in a wide range of creative and technical disciplines including as an illustrator, architectural and civil draughtsman, graphic designer, model maker and within the film animation and theatre industries. He has a passion for three-dimensional design and in 1997 undertook his first-degree in Industrial Design Innovation following award of Art and Design Diploma. Coming to the Industrial Design degree relatively late in his career provided the opportunity to apply, consolidate and expand previously acquired skills towards his primary ambition; to make the world a bit of a better place through the invention of creatively informed new products.
Heath worked at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) until 2025 in commercial and academic capacities, collaborating with experts in Health and Wellbeing, the physical and social sciences and with numerous industrial partners since graduating with first class Honours in 1999. In this time, he and his teams have achieved many products in market, been the recipients of numerous design accolades, from participatory design awards to the securing of significant commercial and public R&D funding. He has many academic dissemination articles in the public domain (circa 50) and is named Inventor on a portfolio of Intellectual Property. As a practicing Industrial Designer, he worked (from 1999) with design consultancy Design Futures (DF) at SHU progressing to hold the post of Principal Industrial Designer. Since 2017 he worked exclusively with the Lab4Living (L4L) as Principal Research Fellow (Associate Professor). While in this academic setting tasks remained highly practical and multidisciplinary, undertaking work complementing his specialisms that include the development of the role of artefacts in co-design.
Alongside his commercial and research council funded activity (circa £6m raised) Heath undertook postgraduate study to achieve a Master of Design with distinction 2012. His study focused on designs role and strategies for meeting environmental sustainability crisis challenges, a theme he continues to develop in recent initiatives, including the Jugaad Assistive Technology, Nano Biogas and Playponics projects. Heath has a genuine passion for his role with key interests including how we use design to hone research questions, elicit and emit insight, how we use design to explore technical parameters and test hypothesis. He holds a belief that true fitness for purpose can only be achieved through holistic enquiry, a willingness and the capability to unpick and synthesise multi-faceted problems often rooted in disciplinary diverse fields. In this way we enable connections to be made that foster creative discovery, solutions, and the positive impact true product innovation yields.
The Head Up project In the later stages of participant informed research and development an older Motor Neurone Disease patient, who had lost the power of speech signalled their ‘thumbs up’ satisfaction with an iterated neck orthosis prototype. For the first time in years Margaret could look directly ahead and make eye contact. Her smile spoke volumes.
Background
Heath considers himself fortunate to have lived, studied and worked in many countries. A UK citizen by birth, at the age of six he emigrated with his family on one of the last ‘Ten Pound Pom’ ships bound for Australia in 1974. He then spent the remainder of his formative years schooling and traveling within Australia. By 16 years he was living back in England permanently but continues to revisit Australia as often as possible. He also lived and worked in Sydney over two years during 1992 to 1994 securing work (with prior training and employment in Theatre Lighting and Sound) as a Theatre Technician at Sydney Opera House, and further with a progressive digital film animation company, ‘Unlimited Energee’ where he worked as an Animation Technician (TV ident, Gogo’s Adventures with English, and Disney’s television series of Aladdin).
Returning to the UK in 1994 Heath attended a prerequisite for Degree Diploma in Art and Design (1995) in England's Southwest. This led to a period working as a sculptor in the Netherlands before attending an unconditionally offered undergraduate place on Sheffield Hallam University’s Industrial Design Innovation programme (1997 and 1999). In his second year Heath was selected for the Erasmus Student exchange programme, living and studying for three months at the University of Lapland, Rovaniemi on the Finnish Arctic Circle.
Working nationally and extensively internationally with users and stakeholders, Heath has over the years accepted various invitations for overseas collaborations, residencies, conferences, exhibitions and lectures including ‘Making Things Better’ in Indonesia, through collaborations with Istanbul Technical University and Vitra ‘Inclusive Design as we age’, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, at the University of Technology in Sydney discussing industry and university collaborations, extensively within Europe and Scandinavia and as Designer in Residence at the University of South Australia supporting their Design for Health programme.
The Nano Biogas project. More recently, following a two-year secondment, Heath returned from India where he lived and worked with communities undertaking a range of ‘frugal’ design projects including the Jugaad Assistive Technology, Nano Biogas and Playponics initiatives. In 2023 the latter converted into a UKRI Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with industry. Heath has a long association with India, first visiting on behalf of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) in 2019 and has formed many personal and professional associations in this diverse and beautiful country.
Experiencing social, economic and health diversities from an early age made an indelible impression on Heath. He has dedicated a very large proportion of his design and research career to inventive initiatives that make positive impacts on our health, wellbeing and our environments. In practice these challenges can present ‘wicked’ problems sets but, in the course of their development, have generated significant bodies of work valuable to Teaching and Learning. Amongst the multidisciplinary Design Research are perspectives that form a growing collection of ‘Tales from the field’. These narrative accounts include diverse discussion topics from ‘Expecting the unexpected; what we found, on the ground’, ‘How far do we go?’, ‘Designing and making to learn’, ‘Designing and making to evaluate’ and ‘Making things better’. His peer review articles including ‘Design as Mediation’ and ‘Positioning creative, three dimensional design practice and understanding its role and value in university health research and development projects’, to name a few.