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

Product design expert Carla Diana shows how many so-called "smart" products are not so smart, and illuminates the social design principles and methods that enable technology to humanize consumer products.

• Cuts through the intimidating chatter of high tech to showcase a vision for smart technology.
• Challenges traditional notions of products as inanimate machines and explores ways they elicit human emotions such as trust, confidence, relief, and joy.
• Showcases vivid examples of social design in products in development.
• Offers concrete guidelines about how to conceptualize, build and optimize products that interact naturally with users and their environment.
• Delves into methods such as vision imagery, scenario storyboarding, video prototyping, behavior charting, ecosystem mapping, and field testing that are instrumental to making products sensitive to people and their social contexts.

Audience: Growing audience of execs and managers interested and involved in product development, design, and management using new technology as well as product marketing. This book's audience overlaps with that of both Gothelf-Seiden and Kolko, as well as that of Thomke. Also, the whole design/IDEO and design thinking crowd, including the audience for Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind and The Design of Business, as well as Tim Brown's Change By Design.