12
Feature
story
Seeing the light
Thomas Seymour might
just be our only industrial
designer-electrician.
Charlotte Roseby meets
an electrician with a unique
skill set and a good eye.
A former professional industrial designer
focusing on light design, Thomas Seymour
has since become a fully licensed, registered
electrical contractor, lighting designer and
manufacturer of some pretty gorgeous lights.
It took him some time to weave the strands
together, but he has now created Thomas
Seymour Design+Electrical, an electrical business
with a distinctive value-add of great design.
He really can bring a design to light. He starts,
he says, by really understanding a client’s vision
for the space: “I have my own impressions of
how I would light and use a space when I visit a
client but, in the end, I won’t be living there. It is
of utmost importance to me that my client enjoys
using the space when the job is complete. So
I want to know how, when and what a space
is going to be used for and then I can design
a lighting solution based on that.”
Industrial designer—removalist
From the beginning, Thomas always had both
creative and technical aptitude. After a brief period
thinking he wanted to be an electrical engineer,
Thomas began studying industrial design as soon
as he finished school (a sensible suggestion—
thanks mum!).
Industrial designers create and produce
designs for commercial, medical and industrial
products, as well as making models and
prototypes of these designs for mass production.
This includes a wide range of manufactured
goods, from toys and toasters to furniture and
heavy machinery.
In Thomas’s case, it was lights. He worked
designing, creating and improving on a range
of lighting products for more than 10 years,
including an intensively creative year working for
Lab Architecture Studio, the international practice
whose projects include Melbourne’s Fed Square.
Industrial design is painstaking and
demanding, says Thomas. Designers need to
consider materials, cost, production methods,
new technology, safety, fashion trends, function,
quality, consumer appeal, ergonomics, the
environment, as well as marketing and business
strategy. That was all do-able, says Thomas, but
he just wasn’t cut out to sit at a desk all day.
It was, strangely, a chance encounter with
one of the owners of Man with a Van that moved
his career onto a different path. At that stage, the
large removals company with its fleet of trucks
(and its large team of what the company calls
“thoroughly pleasant fellows”) was just two guys
with a couple of vans.
What happened next surprised even Thomas:
“I hit him up for a job! I just asked if I could come
and work with him for a while … It turned out to
be one of the happiest years I’ve had.”
The following year, which Thomas spent in
London and Berlin to further his design career,
cemented his realisation that he needed a change
of pace. “I realised I was really healthy and felt
really good during that year with Man with a Van.
I wanted to do something physical, but I knew
I couldn’t be a removalist all my life so I knew
I needed a trade.”
That was his lightbulb moment. Thomas
realised that electrical training would close his
skills loop: he could invent, design, produce,
manufacture and install quality lighting.
Design meets electrical and construction
It was challenging being a mature-age
apprentice, says Thomas. “… Actually, it was
mostly just awkward. I was taking instruction from
people years younger than me who were feeling
uncomfortable dealing with someone who had
been around, travelled—and I’d just had my first
child, so we were at different life stages.”
“I love designing
a light in isolation
from an environment
and then seeing the
many and varied
ways that other
people end up
using them.”
Thomas took up his apprenticeship with
VicTec. “I got a lot of different experiences,” he
says. “It can be challenging if you’re viewed as
labour hire but, if you show a real willingness and
put a lot of effort in, you get the opportunities.”
His opportunities included 18 months installing
building management systems, and 15 months
with PSG doing electrical construction wor