Design engineer
I am a product development engineer. I just finished my MSc in Design and Innovation at DTU, after a BEng in Process and Innovation.
What I am best at is the early part of a project, where nobody has framed the problem yet. Working out what actually matters to the people involved, and then getting it to something physical you can put in front of them and test.
I spent five months as a design intern at the LEGO Creative Play Lab in Billund, and I currently work at SAP in Copenhagen, where I help engineer demo projects.
I am looking for product development, consulting, design or innovation work in Denmark.
/images/portrait.webp
Portrait of Patrick Guldager Heen
Selected projects
28 projects in total/images/drone-immobilisation/hero.webp
Rendered concept visual: an interceptor drone approaching a target drone entangled in cord under a parachute
Biologically inspired drone immobilisation
Sole author, designed, built and ran all 109 experiments
Finding the most effective way to stop a drone, through 109 experiments
Master's thesis. Illegal drone incidents in Denmark rose from 62 in 2023 to 206 in 2024, however Danish police still have no local counter-drone tool other than a firearm, and this means that they usually decline to act, since the available response is either too slow or disproportionate to the threat. I ran 109 experiments against a spinning drone propeller in order to find out what physically stops a drone without destroying it, and then validated the best candidates on a free-flying FPV drone. The answer turned out to be a frayed rope, with five out of five instant stops on the rig, confirmed in flight.
/images/happylight/hero.webp
Light pillar standing on grass at night, casting a warm pool of light downward and a blue zone glow upward
HappyLight
Team of 7, stakeholder mapping, interviews, data analysis
Off-grid wayfinding light for festival campsites
A three-module off-grid light pillar built from recycled zinc drainage pipe, which runs 48 hours across a 7-day festival on one charge, sets its own colour by GPS in order to match the festival's zone map, and installs by an untrained volunteer with an earth drill. This lands at 156–269 DKK per unit at 1,000 units.
/images/ceto-innovation/hero.webp
Receiving the third-place award at DTU Green Challenge, holding the framed prize plaque
CETO Innovation
Team of 7, industry outreach, market model, customer validation and forecasting
Predictive maintenance for district heating networks
A predictive maintenance SaaS for district heating networks, taken from a course concept into the DTU Skylab incubator, with roughly 3 M DKK in annual saving for a medium-sized utility, a 320.85 M DKK addressable market and third place at DTU Green Challenge.
/images/robust-mechanism/hero.webp
Two-player catapult game assembly with the slotted crank mechanism visible
PultMaster 3000
Team of 6, joint CAD, 3D prints, tolerance stack-up, testing
Tolerance-driven mechanism design
A slotted crank mechanism with a 5/8 gear reduction converting rotation into controlled translation, designed to a tolerance scheme and then built and measured in order to check whether the scheme survived real manufacturing variation.
Experience
Employment & ventureThe LEGO Group
The LEGO GroupDesign Intern · Billund
Six months in LEGO's Creative Play Lab developing and testing original play concepts. My concept was selected for further development, ranked first out of 41 pitches, and first among the concepts from seven other design interns.
SAP
SAPStudent Engineer, Customer Engineering (IXP) · Copenhagen
Scrum Master on an internal UI project, where mapping the AS-IS process together with its users cut the workflow from 10 steps to 7. Furthermore I built an integration connecting SAP Analytics Cloud, Datasphere and Digital Manufacturing, and provided technical support across 20+ live corporate events.
CETO Innovation
CETO InnovationIndustry & Partnerships · DTU Skylab Incubator
Seven-person venture building predictive maintenance software for district heating. Third place, DTU Green Challenge.
Makerværket
MakerværketStudent Assistant, Rapid Prototyping Lab · Frederikssund Gymnasium
I ran Makerværket, the school's rapid prototyping lab, instructing students in 3D printing, laser cutting and assembly, and I designed 10+ original builds alongside the illustrated step-by-step instructions that people actually used.
Also documented
/images/chargemate/obd-setup.webp
Peugeot iOn parked in a carport, the car ChargeMate reads over Bluetooth OBD-II
ChargeMate
Team of 2, wrote all software: OBD-II, threading and charge planning
EV charging planner reading live battery state over CAN bus
/images/bike-configurator/hero.webp
Tacton configurator screen for selecting a mountain bike's gears and brakes, with live price and weight totals
Mountain bike configurator
Team of 6, process flows, class diagram, PVM engineering view
From manual quotation to a Tacton configure-to-order system
/images/gea-radical-innovation/hero.webp
Presenting the innovation framework findings in a meeting room
Implementing a Radical Innovation Framework at GEA
Team of 2, everything done jointly, from the interviews to the framework
Why radical ideas stall inside a large manufacturer, and what to change