Heiko has more than two decades experience with planning, managing, and executing product designs for industry leaders like Apple, Motorola, Google, Skype/Microsoft. His mobile user interfaces, messaging experiences, and immersive media interactions have shipped in millions of phones, tablets, and apps.
Heiko is the co-founder of Studio Resilience: A design lab that creates digital art exploring the impact humans have on our natural environment, offering hope through imagination, play and action.
Heiko managed Skype’s mobile design studios in London, Palo Alto, and Redmond and delivered coherent, signature experiences across phone and tablet apps that were used worldwide for millions of Skype calls. He was responsible for designs of new features such as picture messaging, group video calls, and chat redesign and led the efforts for Skype’s first release of their signature video calling experience in the browser.
At Google’s Android group, he acted as the interaction design lead for the core OS experiences of Honeycomb —the first Android release tailored for tablets. Heiko delivered new or reframed solutions for: overall screen navigation, home screen & app launcher, notification system, and text input.
While at Motorola, Heiko created and evangelized design strategies for location-based services, predictive text input, and voice recognition. He led the experience development of iTap 6.0—an intelligent input solution that was included in Motorola’s phones shipping worldwide.
At Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, Heiko developed award-winning design concepts for early communication appliances featuring unified experience principles across industrial design and software interface. While at Apple’s Singapore Research Center, he studied user behaviors and novel input interaction approaches in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. He led the interaction and visual design of Apple’s Advanced Chinese Input Suite—the world’s first integrated speech/pen input system for Chinese.
Heiko graduated in Product Design from Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, Germany and was a Fulbright scholar at San Jose State’s Industrial Design Program.
DESIGN AWARDS
- Selected Design Alumni 2007 by HFG Offenbach/Main: Featured in the exhibition and book “gestalte/create” – Museum of Design, Frankfurt/Germany
- Bronze Industrial Design Excellence Award 2001 by IDSA & BusinessWeek: “BuddySync“ 3G Wireless service for teenagers
- Silver Industrial Design Excellence Award 1997 by IDSA & BusinessWeek: “Apple Advanced Chinese Input Suite” Integrated solution for Chinese input with speech and pen
- Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award 1995 by IDSA & BusinessWeek: “Shared Conceptual Model Process” Method to integrate UI design and industrial design
- Annual Design Review of I.D.Magazine: Best project in the concepts category “Shared Conceptual Model Process”
- Junior Designer Award 1993 by Raymond Loewy Foundation: Special Recognition “Distributed PC system for work groups”
- Goldstar Design Competition 1991: Award of Excellence “Digital assistant for authors and journalists”