My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human

Your relationships with your smart products are about to get a lot more personal.

Think how commonplace it is now for people to ask Siri for the weather forecast, deploy Roomba to clean their homes, or summon Alexa to turn on the lights. The smart home market will reach well over $100 billion in the next five years on the promise of products that are truly integrated with our cooking, cleaning, entertainment, security, and hygiene habits.

But the reality is, these first-generation smart products aren't very smart—yet. We're clearly seeing only the tip of the iceberg in terms of capability and how such products can enhance our lives. How do we take it to the next level?

In a word, design—and more specifically, social design. In this fascinating and instructive book, leading product design expert Carla Diana describes how new technology is allowing designers to humanize consumer products in delightfully subtle ways. Showcasing vivid examples of social design principles such as product presence, object expression, and interaction intelligence, we see how inventive uses of light, sound, and movement can evoke human responses to even the most mundane products. Diana offers clear guidelines and takeaways for conceptualizing, building, and optimizing products using such methods as bodystorming, scenario storyboarding, video prototyping, behavior charting, and more.

My Robot Gets Me provides keen insights and practical advice to anyone interested or involved in the burgeoning smart marketplace, from product designers and developers to managers and venture capitalists.

Carla Diana is a designer, author, and educator who explores the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product design. She has designed a range of products, from robots to connected home appliances, and her designs have appeared on the covers of Popular Science, Technology Review, and the Sunday Review section of the New York Times. Diana created the 4D Design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, serving as its first Designer in Residence. She also serves as Head of Design for Diligent Robotics.

You can find Carla Diana at: carladiana.com/blog/ and twitter.com/carladian.