Bo Rodda

Bo Rodda is a designer, visual artist, technologist, innovation consultant, and educator. He has lectured widely on the critical intersection between the arts and sciences as they are applied to the built environment. His areas of focus include smart cities, innovation, and civic technologies.

As the Professor of Practice and Senior Staff of the Kaplan Institute, I direct the Kaplan Insitute's Industry and Community Partnership Program, IPRO LABS. The IPRO Labs are a collaboration between our students, faculty, and outside partners leveraging creativity, imagination, ingenuity, and focused design thinking to identify and develop innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to the many challenges as well as opportunities facing both community and industry partners.

Bo Rodda is on faculty at the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects (AIADO) and the Department of Art and Technology Studies (ATS) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology where he teaches human centered design and business innovation strategy.

Prior to joining the faculty at the Institute of Design, Rodda was a research associate at the Computation Institute, Urban Center for Computation and Data (UrbanCCD) at the University of Chicago. While at the UrbanCCD, he lead the development of the LakeSIM project, a prototype framework for coupling urban design and computational modeling tools. Subsequently Rodda was a Building Technology and Energy Efficiency Specialist at Argonne National Laboratory (2012) where he was a subject matter expert to the Laboratory’s sustainability and building technologies initiatives. His work focused on projects relating to next generation facility energy management, energy data analysis and visualization, as well as sensor design, deployment, and industrial IoT.

Rodda received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002, and a Masters in Design for Emerging Technologies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects in 2010. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.