Heather Raikes is a creative and innovation leader, designer, researcher, and artist whose work develops next-generation sensory experiences and systems that expand human perception and amplify embodied human potential.
Her career has spanned more than three decades at the forefront of emerging media. From early web innovation to extended reality, she has led pioneering creative work across industry, academia, and the arts, including leadership roles at Microsoft, 8ninths, University of Washington, University of California San Diego, and Temple University. Her work has received numerous honors, including a Digital Innovation Emmy Award, presentation at the Tokyo Olympic Pavilion, and an Oculus LaunchPad Fellowship.
Raikes began her career as a modern dancer with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, an experience that established the body as the central inquiry of her practice. She expanded this embodied inquiry into new media, investigating how emerging technocultural systems reshape the human nervous system and transform the conditions of perception. Alongside her work in emerging media, she cultivated a sustained somatic practice through Pilates and yoga, including BASI Pilates certification and Yoga Alliance RYT-500 training, deepening her understanding of the nervous system, perception, and embodied human potential. Her practice is guided by a central question: how can sensory experience cultivate new possibilities for human perception, embodiment, and becoming in an era of accelerating technocultural change?
This question became the foundation of her doctoral and postdoctoral research and ultimately gave rise to Creative Research Studio, an independent research and innovation laboratory. Using creative research as a methodology for design discovery, the studio develops research frameworks, artworks, experiences, design systems, publications, and venture concepts that expand how people sense, understand, and engage with emerging realities. Its research takes form through Neopoetics®, a futurist body of immersive art that composes new forms of neurosensory experience on the canvas of the human nervous system, and Embodied Futures, a neurodesign platform translating embodied intelligence into products, experiences, and design systems for a more coherent future.
Raikes' artwork has been presented internationally at venues including Lincoln Center (New York), HERE Arts Center (New York), the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Le Cube (Paris), Culturgest (Lisbon), the International Festival of Performance (Barcelona), Di-Egy Festival (Cairo), On the Boards (Seattle), and the San Diego Museum of Art. She has delivered design leadership presentations at forums such as IxDA Interaction Conference, AIGA, LDV Vision Summit, VRLA, and Creative Mornings. Her research has been published internationally in journals including Technoetic Arts, Body, Space & Technology, the International Journal of Art, Culture, Design, and Technology (IJACDT), American Communication Journal, Technologically Expanded Dance, and Poeticanet. Heather Raikes holds a PhD in Digital Arts and Experimental Media from the University of Washington, an MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and an AB from Duke University.