Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation-funded scholar, is a writer, social scientist, and design researcher. She is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design (ID) and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab.

Laura’s research is focused on aesthetics and politics at the intersection of design and emerging technologies. Over the past ten years, she has studied the materialities and futures of socio-technical systems, such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities; 3D printing, local manufacturing, and innovation ecosystems; automation, distributed labor practices, and the future of work; and computational fashion, smart textiles, and wearable medical technologies.

Laura received a bachelor of arts degree in Asian Studies from Skidmore College and a master of international affairs degree from Columbia University. She also received a PhD in communications from Columbia University.

For prospective workshop participants, we ask that you come with questions based on some of the following works (register to receive PDF copies):

Forlano, Laura. 2019. “Stabilizing/Destabilizing the Driverless City: Speculative Futures and Autonomous Vehicles.” International Journal of Communication (Online), June, 2811–39.

Forlano, Laura, and Stephanie Smith. 2018. “Critique as Collaboration in Design Anthropology.” Journal of Business Anthropology 7 (2): 279–300. 

Sloane, Mona, Emanuel Moss, Olaitan Awomolo, and Laura Forlano. 2020. “Participation Is Not a Design Fix for Machine Learning.” ArXiv:2007.02423 [Cs], August. 

This event is part of the ADX: Anthropology & Design Exhibition.