Carla Diana is a designer, author, and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design and tangible interaction. Starting in Fall 2025, she will serve as Associate Professor and Director of Product Design at Lawrence Technological University, where she will lead students in exploring the intersections of emerging tech, physical form, and human experience.
In addition to her academic work and studio practice, she is Design Advisor and former Head of Design for Diligent Robotics, an Austin, TX, based company where advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning manifest in robot assistants to help healthcare workers.
Carla has been part of innovation design firms Smart Design and frog Design where she worked on a range of products from robots to connected home appliances. Her work has appeared on the covers of Popular Science, Technology Review, and The New York Times Sunday Review.
Carla writes and lectures frequently on the social impact of robotics and emerging technology. She is the author of My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (HBR Press 2021), a guide to designing emotionally intelligent tech and LEO the Maker Prince, the first children’s book on 3D printgint. Her latest work uses interactive projection mapping to encourage public dialogue around transportation futures.
In 2018 Carla founded the Interaction Design Program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, a 2-year masters program in creative technology, exploring the intersection of code, form, and electronics through work that manifests as sound, light and motion. She was the program’s first Designer-in-Residence and Head of Department.
Carla holds an M.F.A. in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the Cooper Union.
PROJECTS
CLIENT WORK | PRODUCT CONCEPTS | INSTALLATIONS | WORKSHOPS | EXPERIMENTS
Work from 2013-Present.
