Carla Diana

Designing The Future Through Tangible Storytelling

2015

About this talk

As designers, new technologies are always capturing our imaginations, but in order to become part of our everyday life they need be introduced through human contexts and meaningful stories. In this talk, IoT expert and “maker-futurist” Carla Diana will share methods and strategies for new product visions based on vivid storytelling and tangible model making, looking at techniques such as scenario storyboarding, video narratives and vision imagery. She’ll share case studies from recent product design projects as well as experiments from her design lab work to showcase ways that near future technologies can be embraced as compelling ideas for new types of everyday products.

About Carla Diana

Carla Diana is a hybrid designer keenly focused on realising new visions for Smart Objects and the Internet of Things. In addition to her industry experience at some of the world’s top design firms, such as frog Design and Smart Design, Carla maintains strategic alliances with a number of academic research groups. She is a member of the Georgia Tech Socially Intelligent Machines Lab, and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and the University of Pennsylvania’s Integrated Product Design Program, where she developed the first course on Smart Objects. She is Advisor for the group Tomorrow-Lab, a young design firm that creates electro-mechanical solutions for smart devices and she continues work as a Fellow at Smart Design, where she oversees the Smart Interaction Lab.

Carla’s 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.

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