Carla Diana

• Creative Technologist
  Title
• Smart Design
  Company
• Design
  Industry
• About
  Carla Diana is a hybrid designer keenly focused on realizing new visions for smart objects and the Internet of Things. In her studio she works on future-specting projects in areas such as domestic robots, wearable devices and sentient kitchen appliances, combining experience in industrial and interaction design to create solutions that bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. Carla has had a long-standing working relationship with the product innovation firm Smart Design and has received the honor of being named the firm’s fist Smart Fellow. In this role, she oversees the Smart Interaction Lab, an initiative focused on design explorations in the form of tinkering and hands-on experimentation around topics such as expressive objects, digital making, and presence and awareness. She is also Advisor for the group Tomorrow-Lab, a young design firm that creates electro-mechanical solutions for smart devices.
  
  In addition to her professional design work, Carla is a faculty member in the University of Pennsylvania’s Integrated Product Design Program where she developed the first course focused on smart objects. She maintains strategic alliances with a number of academic research groups such as the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Socially Intelligent Machines Lab, and the Visible Futures Lab at the School of Visual Arts. From 2002 to 2007 she was Professor of Interactive Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she co-wrote the College’s first Interactive Design program and developed Physical Computing courses and a Physical Computing lab.
  
  Her recent article, “Talking, Walking Objects”, appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Review in January 2013, and is a good representation of her view of our robotic future. She has just completed a children’s book for Maker Media about the future of 3D printing and design entitled LEO the Maker Prince.
  
  Carla holds an MFA in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from The Cooper Union.

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  Added: April 2014 • Updated: April 2014