2009
Carla Diana is a creative professional who tries to live as close to the near future as possible. As senior designer at Smart Design, her projects include domestic robots, mobile devices and sentient kitchen appliances. In addition, Carla maintains an independent practice which includes a line of digitally distributed furniture, a series of sound-based sculptural installations and a selection of pieces that are best described as dynamic "virtual objects".
Prior to Smart, Carla was a Senior Design Technologist at frog design, Creative Director at Planetii, Interface Guru at Sarkissian-Mason, and Designer at Karim Rashid's studio. Early in her career, she led a product design research lab within the Good Housekeeping Research Institute. She is a founding partner in the conceptually-focused design consultancy, Spank, and creator of interactive sound project Repercussion.org.
Carla holds an MFA in Design from Cranbrook and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Cooper Union. From 2002 to 2007 she was Professor of Interactive Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design and later joined the Industrial Design faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology . She has written for several publications including Interactions, Core77, The AIGA Journal, and Good Housekeeping.
In 2001 Carla was named an Art Director's Club "Young Gun". Recent awards include winning a Museum of Fine Arts Houston Brown Foundation Fellowship, several ADC Distinctive Merit Awards, PRINT Interaction 2004 Award, and the Flash Forward Film Festival 2004 Experimental Award.
Recent writing
CORE77, INDUSTRIAL DESIGN SUPER SITE
“Atoms for Bits: Designing Physical Embodiments for Virtual Content”, June 2009
Blog posts:
CORE77, INDUSTRIAL DESIGN SUPER SITE
“Physical pixels: Design for the not so near future”
“Percussa: AudioCubes for music creation”
“Slap Widgets: Virtual controls you can touch”
CRANBROOKDESIGN website
“Life on the Borderline Between Possible and Impossible”
INTERACTIONS, THE JOURNAL OF THE ACM
“Book Review: A Kiss is Just a Kiss, A Sigh is Just a Deselection”, January February 2009
INTERACTIONS, THE JOURNAL OF THE ACM
“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hackers”, March April 2008
CORE77, INDUSTRIAL DESIGN SUPER SITE
“Device Art: Coming to America?”, July 2007
CHI2008 ALT.CHI CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
“Fragile: A Case Study for Evoking Specific Emotional Responses”, April 2008
Carla Diana: design
© 2008 Carla Diana Design
