By Geoffrey Eu

YOU don't have to be a rocket scientist to complete a hands-on renovation of your home - but it helps.

Just ask Mark Seeger, a self-professed techno-geek whose career trajectory took him from Nasa to Apple to Singapore, where he landed eight years ago and reinvented himself as a Web-focused designer and business consultant - but not before he also started, and later sold, a biodegradable plastics company. He is one well-connected expatriate, in more ways than one.

The tall, lanky Seeger, 30, is a T-shirt clad child of the digital age who grew up in Holland and New Hampshire.

The transformation Click on thumbnail to view

He may look like he's barely out of college, but as the Singapore-based director of a digital innovation lab at OgilvyOne, he is at the frontline of an industry that didn't even exist a few years ago, doing something that is second nature to him. In essence, he devises interesting ways to connect brands with their consumers.

Mr Seeger has been tinkering, designing and innovating from - as he tells it - the time he was barely out of diapers. His work has given him the opportunity to do a lot of cool stuff, like putting a GPS transmitter into a Coke bottle and tracking its journey from the factory into the wide world.

The geeky stuff at US space agency Nasa involved designing a sensor package to analyse pollution in the atmosphere, an activity otherwise known as advanced atmospheric light LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, or radar using lasers). 'I was just a small cog in a very big machine,' he says. In high school, he built a Nixie Tube clock - made from Soviet-era valves - that not only tells the time but also the date and precise latitude and longitude, thanks to a built-in GPS transmitter. The clock, which looks like a working piece of contemporary art, is attached to a lamp stand he bought at IKEA.