Julia Solano is a systems designer, futurist, social entrepreneur, watercolor painter, and bamboo architect passionate about shaping the way people see themselves and their communities. She’s spent much of the past decade co-founding and designing in AI companies, architecting and building bamboo and earth spaces for communing, investigating the complexity of cooperatives and community by living in experimental cities, communes, and cults, and imagining and creating social, digital, and physical infrastructure to bridge to more hopeful futures.
She founded Making Tangible and her practice’s recurring themes and curiosities are participatory program design and facilitation, exponential technology and impact infrastructure, foresight, immersive storytelling, bio-inspired design, and vernacular design/build. She is currently Community Architect for The Tech We Want.
Previously, she was part of Omidyar Network's Exploration and Future Sensing Lab where she focused on participatory grant-making, diverse futures, creative storytelling and immersive experience design. She co-founded Humanitas AI and has worn hats across tech (UX design, project management), marketing, nonprofit, philanthropy, and design/build.
When she's not thinking about systems and futures, she can be found holding a machete and designing and building bamboo and earth structures for communing – festivals, educational or community centers, healing spaces – in jungles and deserts around the world.
Education in Engineering + Architecture from UC Berkeley with certification in Human-Centered Design and Entrepreneurship and Technology.