Vernelle A. A. Noel

Vernelle A. A. Noel, Ph.D. is an architect, design scholar, artist, TED Speaker, and Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, where she investigates traditional and automated making and their intersections with society. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she builds new frameworks, methodologies, and tools to explore social, cultural, and political aspects of computation and emerging technologies for new reconfigurations of practice, pedagogy, and publics.

Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Mozilla Foundation, and ideas2innovation (i2i), among others. Dr. Noel is a recipient of the DigitalFUTURES Young Award for exceptional research and scholarship in the field of critical computational design.

Noel’s work is situated at the intersection of computation, ethnographic inquiry, and critical practice, where she interrogates socio-cultural and socio-technical issues in computation and computational technologies in design and making. Her scholarship combines methods and concepts from craft, human-computer interaction and media studies, and science and technology studies (STS). A scholar committed to fostering inclusive and minority perspectives on design, making, and technology, Noel conducts workshops and gives talks on design computation extensively across the globe.