carladiana.com

Carla Diana

Product designer, artist and creative consultant

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.

Making meaning in an Internet of Things

Something exciting has been happening to our everyday objects. Things that were once silent and static can now sing, glow, buzz and be tracked online. Some are constantly listening for sounds, sights and touches to translate into meaningful inputs. Others have the ability to learn, refining their behaviors over time. They can be connected to one another as well as the Internet. As people continue to interact with data in all aspects of life, they will expect their digital devices to deliver real-time, visualized, networked feedback. As designers, the emergent Internet of Things presents a juicy opportunity to pioneer new territory in rich interaction, but it also can backfire, filling people’s lives with more frustrations over technology than ever before. In this talk, Carla Diana, who works on smart objects in her studio and the award-winning firm Smart Design, will share stories from the front lines. She will explore both the opportunities and the challenges that come with designing interactive hardware/software products and ecosystems through a series of case studies and design experiences.

Slides

http://uxlondon.s3.amazonaws.com/2014/slides/making-meaning-in-an-internet-of-things.pdf

E-Sketching for Interaction Prototyping

Skill level: Introductory, little or no experience with electronics.

E-Sketching is a tool for conveying and capturing the right level of information as quickly as possible. When designing for interactive systems that have both a physical and a digital component there is great value in bringing sketching off of the notepad and realising certain aspects of the interaction in rough form early and often. In this workshop participants will be introduced to a set of Arduino-based tools and be challenged to create a game or product that incorporates a variety of physical interactions.

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