Patrick Guldager Heen

I am a design and innovation engineer trained at DTU, where I took a BEng in Process and Innovation and then continued with an MSc in Design and Innovation. My design philosophy comes down to one thing, which is that I do not trust a design until it has met something real, whether that is a manufacturing tolerance, an actual user, or people with genuine experience from the field.

For my master's thesis I created a counter-drone tool for public authorities, which allows law enforcement to neutralise a drone without risking collateral damage and while preserving the forensic evidence. Before that I spent six months in the LEGO Creative Play Lab, where I created prototypes for new innovative play. In between I have taken part in creating a festival light for production, torn apart a bicycle manufacturer's order process, and pitched a predictive maintenance start-up which won third place at DTU Green Challenge.

Furthermore I like the parts of the job that most people skip, being writing the requirement down properly, testing the assumption that the whole product rests on before drawing the enclosure, and saying plainly what I would do differently next time.

Outside of the projects listed here I keep modelling in CAD in my own time, since I find it genuinely enjoyable rather than something I only pick up when a course requires it, and a good part of what I know across SOLIDWORKS and Fusion 360 has come from work that was never handed in anywhere. This means that when a new tool turns up in a job I tend to be reasonably quick on it.