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 and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. For 2018-2019, Forlano is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Digital Life Institute at Cornell Tech in New York. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.
While at the Berkman Klein Center, she will work on a book manuscript on Posthuman Economies, which integrates her diverse scholarship and practice over the past 10 years. Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between 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.
Forlano is an editor of the following books: Bauhaus Futures (forthcoming MIT Press), DigitalSTS Handbook (forthcoming Princeton University Press) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). Forlano’s research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Business Anthropology, She Ji, Catalyst, Demonstrations, Spheres, Design Issues, the Journal of Peer Production, Fibreculture, Digital Culture & Society, ADA, Journal of Urban Technology, First Monday, The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing and Science and Public Policy. Her research has been featured in The New York Times.