I recently founded Karno to develop and deliver extraordinary entertainment experiences. The vision is to create immersive products in which people have fun but also through which they self-realise; a bit like running a marathon, or climbing a mountain, not necessarily winning or getting to the top but, you know, experiencing limits.

Between 2008 and 2015 I was co-director of Slingshot, a street games company. Whilst there I co-created outlandish and groundbreaking games such as Hyde, a bio-activated maze, Hounded, a scent based treasure hunt (with tracking dogs), and cult street game 2.8 Hours Later. This last one was a biggie, generating almost £900K pa and attracting over 60,000 players during the five years it ran. I also produced igfest, the festival of street games, that Slingshot staged most years.

We closed Slingshot in 2015. Since then I have taken roles as a digital product manager. I needed the work tbh, but I also wanted to up-skill in contemporary product development methodologies. Now I have brought these skills and experience back into the arts & culture space where I am using them to develop products at Karno.

I use games to transform players’ perception of their world through imaginative engagement with the themes of the work, generally using audacious propositions to grab people’s attention. I’m really interested in how our needs as social beings, our experience of physical reality and of ideology combine to create our sense of self. I have made games about social breakdown caused by a pandemic, the demands of caring for an unruly infant, and the lost ecologies and possible rewilding of our ‘natural’ environment.

If you need some help developing a project, and especially if you want to turn it into a product, give me a shout. I’m familiar with various product development frameworks such as Jobs To Be Done, have Agile development qualifications and am a Google Analytics Power User. I’m also a competent web developer - React, javascript, html and css, as well as prototyping tools such as Framer X.

I was a founding resident of the Pervasive Media Studio and am proud to continue to be associated with it.

Links