Nemetschek Allplan, the leading European provider of architecture and engineering software, appointed Gray Holland as Chief Design Officer (CDO) on May 1, 2009. In the newly created position, the US-born designer will be responsible for software design and the consumer experience. This will include user guidance and the software’s ease of use through to every touch point of the Allplan brand.

Gray Holland has more than 20 years' experience in automotive, product and software design. Most recently, he was head of the Alchemy Labs design studio in San Francisco, where he worked for customers such as Disney, Seiko, Procter & Gamble, Autodesk, Hewlett Packard and BMW, among others. After completing his degree, he worked for a number of years as a car designer at General Motors. He was one of the pioneers in the area of three-dimensional, computer-aided industrial design.

Gray Holland studied design at the Art Center College for Design in Pasadena, and physics and mathematics in Los Angeles. Until his recent move to Munich, he has been professor at the California Center for the Arts in San Francisco teaching digital design process.

"With Gray Holland, we are putting user friendliness and the quality of the user interface at the core of our product development. In times of increasingly complex work processes, this is the key to more efficiency in the planning of buildings," states Peter Mehlstäubler, CEO and managing director of Nemetschek Allplan.