New Releases by Carla Diana

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.

LEO the Maker Prince teaches children (both young and old) about 3D printing by following Carla and LEO's journey through Brooklyn. LEO is a walking, talking robot who has the magical ability to to print (in plastic) any object that Carla draws. The other robots have their own special capabilities: H1-H0 prints in metal, Sinclair-10 can find and print objects from a huge catalog of designs, and the others (including AL1C3-D, IRIS-7, and NiXie) have unique talents, too. Readers can come along for the journey, too: all of the objects in the book are printable one way or another.