Benedetta Piantella
Benedetta Piantella is a designer turned humanitarian technologist. She has been involved in international development for the past ten years, ever since her experience of surviving the Tsunami in 2004. She has also been teaching for the past decade in different disciplines and age groups, from Lego Robotics to K-12 students to HCI, Physical Computing and Engineering for Development to graduate students at NYU. She founded two R&D companies focused on producing sustainable solutions to social problems worldwide and built partnerships with organizations such as the UN, UNICEF, The Earth Institute, Universities such as NYU, Columbia University and Princeton, and multiple NGOs. Her design research and practice focus on applying systems thinking and user-driven development to insure equitable access to life-sustaining resources, often through networks, data-collection and real-time monitoring, and distributed infrastructure.
