Heather Martin

Vice President Design, Smart Design, London, United Kingdom Heather is the Vice President of Design at Smart Design, a design and innovation consultancy. She leads multidisciplinary global teams on large-scale digital projects across all industry sectors from Smart’s London studio.

She has worked in design for 18 years throughout Europe and is recognized as one of the leading authorities in interaction design. In her early career, she worked as a product designer at Tangerine where she became increasingly interested in the convergence of hardware and software. In order to learn more about software development, she studied interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London. After graduating, she worked at the RCA as a visiting tutor and Research Fellow and co-founded the Appliance Design Studio, a virtual organization between the RCA, IDEO and Hewlett-Packard Labs. In 2000, she joined IDEO where she worked as a senior interaction designer and project lead for the Prada NYC flagship store with OMA/Rem Koolhaas and designed a wireless inflight entertainment system for private VIP planes for Lufthansa Technik AG.

Throughout her career, she has kept a keen interest in education. In 2003, she moved to Italy to work as an Associate Professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), where she specialized in tangible computing and became the Academic Director in its final year. In 2006, she moved to Denmark where she co-founded the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). Positioned as a design school, consultancy and research lab specializing in interaction design, CIID was listed as one of the world’s best design schools by Business Insider in 2012.

Her client work spans transportation, finance, healthcare, media, telecom, retail and automotive. She is a regular speaker in Europe and her work has been recognized through international press and design prizes, including a Gold and Silver Business Week Awards for her work with IDEO and Prada. She was also listed as one of the 40 most influential designers under the age of 40 by Wallpaper Magazine. She has a bachelor’s degree in product design from the University of Northumbria and a master’s degree in interaction design from the Royal College of Art.