Meet the Team

Ian Lawton - Development Engineer

What name/nickname do you prefer to be called?

There’s not much you can shorten Ian to, so Ian it is 😊  I was inexplicably known as Ian onion at one point.  

If you could write your own job title that best describes what you do here, what would it be?

Development Engineer – my role is to take a product concept and create a useful, saleable product that the customer will see value in, and ultimately, want to buy more of!  The design process involves assessing the market - before creating prototypes and working products for testing and trials. Taking onboard and acting on critical feedback is also a key part of this – to get the product right.  

What do you enjoy about the work you do?

I find the design of industrial safety equipment interesting and exciting, probably because it has such close connections to two of my hobbies, caving and rock climbing. The team approach to projects at SpanSet works well and I enjoy working with a group of like-minded people.  

What are your hobbies?

Since having two children we decided to carry on doing what we love but in a more child friendly format! The family all go caving, cycle touring, rock climbing, hill walking, ghyll scrambling and canoeing and it’s great fun enjoying the outdoors with them.  I also like to go out cycling alone, I often seem to have good ideas out in the fresh air! 

What volunteering or passion projects do you do outside of work?

I have been caving for nearly 30 years. I love searching for new passages that no person has visited and explored before. This can mean spending many hours digging out mud and boulders from a choked cave passage, or my personal favourite, searching an alpine hillside or tropical rainforest for open entrances leading directly to the unknown……