Austin Holdsworth

Austin is a lecturer in Product Design at Huddersfield University and associate lecturer at RCA and Sheffield Hallam. He started out doing a course at MMU in Interactive Art, writing his own brief on the first day of the course. In his final year, he worked with animation and, in his words, 'blowing up a lot of things'. His final piece was an animation of a simple white cube, which eventually exploded- visually illustrating his unhappiness of the culture of The White Cube in London; this was a Young British Artist's scene. Austin learned that he was maybe not so at home in the world of art, but in design instead.

Austin went on to study at RCA, he studied Design Interactions. While studying here, Austin worked on a project called 'Archival Burial' in 2009 which would hypothetically fossilise a human body. The idea behind it was if a person could be fossilised for the same amount of time as Earth has existed, it may change our understanding of humans in the grand scheme of life. At a similar time, Austin was also working on another project called 'the Realitivist's Clock'. This project required you to input your date of birth an career. The machine would then print a list of people who had been successful at different ages- ultimately teaching the lesson that you shouldn't be comparing yourself to other's- success is relative to an individual and not on a large scale.

After leaving the RCA, Austin got a job at Haque Design Research. Here he worked on large scale designs such as Burble- this was made of 1000 helium balloons which contained an LED and a controller. This interactive installation was controlled by the public using the remotes they had and was installed over various locations such as Dubai and Barcelona.

Austin went on to create a small design company called Ahaaa. This company focused on creating design competitions for businesses- getting artists and designers to propose projects which would be presented at conferences. Winners would receive the Future of Money Design Award.

Pictured above is the Intergalactic Estate Agency installation- commissioned by the Eden Project.