Craig Smith

Craig Smith founded Smith Design Engineering and is its Managing Director.

He has worked on both the consultancy and the contracting side of building services, and that is the more useful half of his background. It means a design leaving this practice has been read twice: once against the regulations, and once against how it will actually be bought, sequenced and installed. Designs that are compliant but cannot be built to the programme, or can be built but price badly, are a cost the client carries and the designer usually never sees.

He works throughout Scotland and England and across both building control regimes — the Approved Documents in England and Wales, and the Technical Handbooks and building warrant process in Scotland — and regularly leads projects from initial concept through construction to completion.

His project record covers commercial offices, retail banking, hospitality, industrial facilities, education, residential development and leisure. He led the electrical design for the conversion of an empty Gateshead warehouse into a manufacturing facility, including the incoming supply upgrade, supplies to overhead gantry cranes, high-bay and external lighting, and the underground ducting the main contractor had to allow for. He was senior electrical design engineer on the first Topgolf venue in Scotland, covering the driving range's ball-tracking and scoring infrastructure and a bar built around live sports broadcast.

He remains directly involved in project delivery, client management and business development rather than only in running the practice, which is why enquiries tend to reach an engineer rather than an account manager.