Faculty Profiles
Carla Diana : Associate Director, Interaction and Industrial Design, Smart Design
Carla Diana is a creative professional who tries to live as close to the near future as possible.
As Associate Director of Interaction and Industrial Design at Smart Design, her projects include domestic robots, mobile devices and sentient kitchen appliances. In her work, she combines experience in industrial and interaction design to create solutions that bridge the gap between the physical and the digital. Carla also 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.
Carla holds an MFA in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Cooper Union. She has taught and lectured internationally, including several years at the Savannah College of Art and Design and a year as visiting faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she was the creative director for the iconic humanoid robot, Simon. She has written for several publications including Interactions, FastCo Design, 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. She has just completed a studio residency at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York focused on explorations in interactive object-making.
- Education
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MFA 3D Design, Cranbrook Academy of Art; BE Mechanical Engineering, The Cooper Union
- Professional Experience
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Senior Design Technologist, frog design; Creative Director, Planetii; Art Director, Sarkissian-Mason; Head of the Tech Lab at the Good Housekeeping Research Institute; Professor, Savannah College of Art and Design; Visiting Assistant Professor, The Georgia Institute of Technology
- Publications
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Interactions, Core77.com, Best Practice: The Pros on Adobe Flash by Doug Easterly; Flash 8 Bible by Snow Dowd and Rob Reinhardt, The AIGA Journal, Good Housekeeping Magazine, E/Town: The Home Electronics Guide
- On the Web
