Talking to Tech Designer Carla Diana

This year’s World IP Day theme celebrates Women and IP: Accelerating Innovation and Creativity, and for that reason as well as the fact that artificial intelligence dominates all topics these days, my guest for this episode is the highly innovative Carla Diana, whom I first interviewed in 2014. 

Carla is a tech designer, author, and educator. She runs the 4D design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan; she is the lead designer at Diligent Robotics in Austin, Texas; and she is the author of dozens of articles and essays about technology and design. Her most recent book, published in 2021 by Harvard Business Review Press, is My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human. And we’ll talk about what that means, plus generative AI, driverless cars, ethics in technology, and at least one product I had not imagined was a thing.  

Show Contents

• 00:01:24 - Carla’s background.
• 00:05:57 - Why good design is social.
• 00:11:55 - Design modalities & thinking about consumers with disabilities.
• 00:20:27 - That tech should not mimic human behavior.
• 00:28:57 - On avoiding innovation for its own sake.
• 00:36:07 - On ethics in technology.
• 00:45:51 - Generative AI and the arts.
• 01:00:55 - Tech solutions for tech problems (e.g. Glaze for visual artists).
• 01:05:32 - Self-driving vehicles.
• 01:09:30 - Economic & social implications of a driverless world.
• 01:15:26 - Combining design and ethics.