About
Greg Katz is an award-winning industrial designer with over 10 years working across design firms and in-house teams at Google and Amazon. He has brought design leadership to cutting-edge products in emerging domains with a strong focus on robotics. Greg lives between the lines of design, product and engineering. He helps teams converge on system architectures, evaluate technical directions, inform product development processes, and lead cross-functional efforts.
Currently, Greg is a staff industrial designer on Everyday Robots, where he is working with a world-class team to build learning robots. As the team’s first full-time designer, he is helping to build in-house design competencies.
From early 2017 to late 2020, Greg was an industrial designer at Amazon Lab 126, where he worked on next-generation consumer products from early concept to scale production phases. Greg was the first IC industrial designer hired to work on Astro (launched in Fall of 2021), and was one of its original core members. He was also a lead industrial designer on Amazon’s first mobile delivery platform, Scout, which launched in Winter of 2019.
Prior to Amazon, Greg was an industrial designer at X’s central design team, where he worked primarily for The Everyday Robot Project. He worked between teams to build mobile and mobile-manipulator platforms and drive products from sketch to detailed design. His role involved close interaction with MEs, EEs, SWEs, navigation and controls specialists, UX researchers and digital UX designers.
In 2014, Greg joined Alphabet’s Google Robotics as one of the first members of its design and research team. He helped establish foundational UX/ID/Human-Robot-Interaction principles for the larger program. His conceptual work was fundamental in helping gain executive buy-in on at least three new robot initiatives.
Prior to Alphabet, Greg worked at Beatbots, a social robotics company best known for the widely-beloved Keepon. Greg worked directly under roboticist Dr. Marek Michalowski PhD. He designed characters for the music, toy, and entertainment industries as well as for clinical research purposes. During this time, Greg also consulted for the renowned creative agencies Bot&Dolly and Autofuss.
In 2012, Greg graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied industrial design. He spent a semester abroad at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Greg’s unique blend of experiences give him insight into robotics domains ranging from mobile platforms all the way to 7-DOF manipulators and social robots. His body of knowledge includes morphology or architecture definition, human acceptance and human-robot-interaction (HRI), design for mobility and navigation, sensor architecture design, and design for manipulation and grasping. Greg is constantly learning and looking to improve processes, and has implemented practices such as computational design, lo-fi arduino and mechatronic prototyping.
He is the recipient of numerous academic and industry awards, including the Spark Concept Design Award, Autism Connects International Design Competition Winner, Core77 Design Award for Social Impact, IDSA Merit, The James R. and Dorothy E. Shipley Award, FAA Most Outstanding Senior and UIUC Most Outstanding Senior 100 Honorary Merit Award.
His work has been featured on publications such as WIRED, Time, CNBC, The Verge, Makezine, TechCrunch, Core77, Fast Company, Forbes, Business Insider and The New York Times.