Ep. 205: Ana Arriola-Kanada’s Heroic Path to Ethical AI & Platform Whispering

CleverEpisodes

Dec 12

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Product Specialist, Ana Arriola-Kanada, grew up in ‘the valley’ just north of LA, watching Robotech and working in the family shop. She moved to Japan just after HS to work in Anime. An autodidact driven by a powerful work ethic and growth mindset, she propelled through all facets of tech & design playing key roles in the development of web design, emoji (Adobe), mobile computing and the original iPhone (Apple), UI/UX, PlayStation (Sony)…etc. It was Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos who tripped her ethical alarm wire, which, as traumatic as that was, has led Ana to the forefront of ethical AI where she has led teams in designing ethical frameworks (Meta, Microsoft, IDEO) and advocates for the inclusion & intersectionality of all humans and the care of our planet in developing those data sets.

Learn more about Ana at Linkedin, Threads, Instagram or Twitter.

Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Ana Arriola-Kanada. Whether that name means anything to you or not, her work has definitely meant something to you. It’s impossible to gauge just how powerfully and ubiquitously Ana has impacted our lives and culture through her work, influence, and creativity. So buckle up - This one is a wild ride through the worlds of tech & design from the early early days of the internet through the advent of mobile computing to the forefront of Ethical AI - Ana has been there and been a key architect the whole way. Professionally-speaking Ana is an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning product specialist. Practically speaking, Ana is an auto-didact with a growth mindset that has propelled her through animation, graphic design, information & interaction design, hardware and product design, product management, entrepreneurship, UI/UX, research, strategy, leadership and advocacy. Ana’s career trajectory is absolutely bananas - From Adobe and creating the first emoji, to Apple where she was the Product Line Manager for design of the original iPhone, to the being the Head of hardware design at the now-infamous Theranos, (if you’ve read Bad Blood or seen the tv series the Dropout) you know that Ana famously called out Elizabeth Holmes on unethical activity and quit on the spot, taking her whole team with her…To innovative products, and Sony’s ubiquitous UX, to setting the tone and developing frameworks for the ethics around AI at the majors including Samsung, Meta Facebook, and Microsoft - where she also contributed meaningfully to the partnership on AI. And Now she’s a Managing Director at IDEO Tokyo. Ana is also a queer, latine, mother of 4, a fierce proponent of empathy-driven and human-centered design , a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry AND for global intersectionality in the data sets that inform the AI and ML that will impact us all. Ana has been right there on the ground floor of the most critical technological flashpoints of modern culture. When we started this conversation she joked that she’s speaking to me from the future. At the time I thought she was referring to Tokyo’s time zone being 14 hours ahead of mine - but now I know it’s because Ana is always ahead of her time…. Here’s Ana…
Ana: Hi, I’m Ana, my pronouns are they/them/theirs and she/her/hers. I currently live in Tokyo where we just moved recently. Formerly a resident of Kyoto, Japan. And I’m currently the Managing Director of IDEO, Tokyo.
Amy: That’s what you currently are doing. But you have done so much before now. I can’t wait to hear all about it. (Laughs) But I always really like to go back to the very beginning, so can you talk to me about your childhood, your family dynamic, your hometown, things that made an impression on your young creative mind.
Ana: Oh, absolutely. I was born in Hollywood, California. Raised over the Hollywood Hills in the Valley, so a Valley girl in North Hollywood. I'm a child of first generation immigrants. I'm a second generation immigrant. My grandfather and grandmother, along with their children, undocumented, immigrated into America from Mexico and we settled in the Los Angeles area. Growing up in LA, as far back as I can remember, it's never been one set of a community that I found myself in. I found myself in pretty much not only the Latina community within the Mexican-American Chicana community of Los Angeles and particularly the San Fernando Valley, but also really mixed with huge swathes of Filipinos, with second, third, sometimes fourth generation Japanese-Americans during that period. Jewish-American, folks from the Middle East. The Valley is very diverse. The circle of which my friend and community was comprised of was also various different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. I think one of the earliest memories of something that definitely pushed me towards this direction that I find myself in now working at the edge, in the future but grounded very presently in the impactful now, would have to go back to sixth grade. There was a television show. This episodic soap opera for kids and it was a cartoon. The name of it was called Robotech and every week the episode was different. It was very, like people died which was new for kids.
Amy: What? Yeah.
Ana: It's like, 'wow, our hero just got killed off.'
Amy: Oh my god. (Laughs)
Ana: And that really sparked my interest in mechanical engineering because they were showing things in that series that had never been done in the Western world. They were showing complex aviation, mechanical drawings [0.05.00] that were animated in explicit detail, unfolding and creating these robot forms.
Amy: Wow.
Ana: That later I would learn are called mecha and later I would know that that genre is called anime before the Western world even knew what anime was.
Amy: So for context, are we talking '70s, '80s?
Ana: This is 1984. So it had just come out in Japan on television and they had got the rights and they had released it in America. Seeing this was like, 'what is this genre? Who are these artists that are creating this amazing content?' Oh, by the way, as a kid it's like these toys. Interesting. So I did a lot of self-active digging and found out where I can really dig deep into this and that's where I ended up falling off the cliff in terms of discovery and understanding that there are so many interesting things that are not in the Western media or Western culture that are coming from Japan at this period. Movies and direct-to-video animations that really informed my aesthetic, really informed my fascination for the language and the culture. So later when I was in high school I did an internship at a studio called Film Roman and Film Roman was based in the Valley. They were the animation studio that won the contract away from Klasky-Csupo that was of Rugrats fame, that originally did the first season of the Simpsons. Later Film Roman took over the Simpsons and I was an intern on the Simpsons doing storyboards, cleaning up storyboards and doing production level work for seasons three and four.
Amy: Oh, that's fun. (Laughs)
Ana: Yeah, that was really neat. And that actually got me into the professional side of animation and sharing what I knew and what I had been learning, also to the animation community where a lot of friends at that time were working at Walt Disney Feature Animation. They secretively, I hate to say this, (laughs) but a lot of the people that were working on Beauty and the Beast, and Little Mermaid, my friend at that period had The Art of Miyazaki books on their desk. (Laughs)
Amy: Oh yeah.
Ana: So this is like 1988, 1989. No one is saying that Disney is copying Tezuka Osamu that did Kimba the White Lion (laughs) that turned into Lion King (laughs) but they were heavily influenced by it. Which is probably why later in our lives they ended up buying Miyazaki's studio here at Studio Ghibli to be part of the Disney family. But anyway, just before I was able to graduate from high school, I was also ahead in my educations because I had skipped a grade early on in elementary school. I knew that this was something I wanted to do, or at least try to do professionally and I thought that the animation industry in Japan would be as amazing and as awesome as it was in the Western world and still is in the Western world. So I ended up packing up my stuff by myself and moving out West to Japan. And that started a 35 year journey of going back and forth.
Amy: I do want to go back to your youthful years because you skipped a grade. It sounds like you were incredibly, let's say ambitious with learning from a very young age. Does that ring true?
Ana: I was ambitious with regards to the science. So from the liberal arts perspective back in elementary school I was struggling with things that later in life, after having my own children, that I realized that are now superpowers but were challenges for me. I have four kids, the oldest and my middle child were tested when they were in elementary school in San Francisco, and they were diagnosed with dyslexia and dysgraphia which is hereditary. That meant that I also struggled with dyslexia and dysgraphia way early on before it was ever diagnosable, before it probably even had a name for it. I found through life and pushing and perseverance that I was able to create coping mechanisms and solutions that would [0.10.00] help me solve some of the focus and some of the understanding and learning how to learn in different ways that fit my brain.
Amy: Wow.
Ana: So that's a little bit of a background that is relates to skipping that grade.
Amy: Yeah, well I think dyslexia and dysgraphia are superpowers, but then also the coping mechanisms and your ability to sort of adapt and find your way to learn in the way that you needed to learn also sounds like a superpower. And your home dynamic, are you getting support from your parents? And are they feeling the creativity of you becoming something that you might want to pursue?
Ana: My parents being immigrants, they were all in. Working and doing everything they could to provide for myself. I was an only child. I do have a step-sister but we're very far apart in age and I really consider myself still to be an only child. I remember that work ethic at a very early age rubbing off on me. Seeing my parents go to work before the sun came up, seeing them at dinner time. Then later when I was in elementary school my father and mother decided to go into a small business. And they went into becoming a purveyor of really high-end meats, like a high-end butchery and produce. A small little corner, it was like a high-end bodega but they really focused on the quality and the heritage of the meats in the local LA area. That unfortunately caused me to be dragged into the family business at a very early age.
Amy: Sure.
Ana: That's why I remember building that work ethic. Later in life I would have to go through many years of therapy to undo that work ethic, of working through holidays and working late into the night. But that definitely paid its dividends. It paid its way forward to get me to where I am today and that drive and the fire that now we call 'hustle' in an entrepreneurial context that really you just turn into a game. You find ways to not make it monotonous and not make it like a grind, but to game-ify it. That's one of the biggest takeaways. My parents were loving. They saw that I had curiosity and fascinations to things that they didn't understand. Like I talked about when I discovered that series, which is called Macross by the way, now known as Robotech in America. They took me to a conference. They had these pop-up conferences where they would show the movies and the videos in Japanese with no subtitles and the conference hall would sell stuff. I remember my father telling me later that he felt really weird taking me to this conference because it was unusual and unlike anything that he had ever been to. He had gone to some conferences, he was a coin collector and this and that, so he knew a little bit about subculture, nerd culture. Later in life my oldest was really into My Little Pony, and they wanted to go to a My Little Pony conference that was also aka pseudo sort of a furries gathering
Amy: (Laughs) Okay.
Ana: So when I took them to the conference I felt like my parents actually. I was like, 'whoa, this is how my parents must have felt (laughs) when they took me to my first Japanese animation conference.'
Amy: Wow.
Ana: 'I've got to be cool with this, I gotta be okay with it, I'm a mom, I'm supporting my child that loves this genre.' So yeah. (Laughs) It was a good childhood, I definitely was loved.
Amy: It sounds like it. It also sounds like you had some sort of variety of experiences, you had taken us through your interest in animation or anime and your move to Japan which... all right, where does the bravery come from?
Ana: When I was in high school, and again I was in anime, again people didn't know what it was and I would bring these magazines that were all in Japanese. People would try to pick on me, bully me, but I was able to defend myself, protect myself, and I think that from an early age my instinct was telling me if you loved something, go all in and follow it till you have a constant full stream of it that you can satiate yourself from. That might be a store where you know you can buy the stuff from, or finding out a particular artist that might have story-boarded or technically directed a thing, a TV show or a movie to learn about it. I think it was the deep diving which was also one of my coping mechanisms early on, if I wanted to learn or get proficient at a given subject I would have to go very, very deep. I would have to deep in a way where I just couldn't be book smart. I had to find my own means to figure out what was the topic, what was the subject that was being taught to me, how did I comprehend it in a way where I could do recall? Because otherwise I would just forget it. And I think that, combined with being part of the family business and learning about that side of entrepreneurship and what it means to always take care of the community that gives their time to be part of your business, to taking care of your loved ones. And being Mexican-American, my family had always had the saying 'blood is thicker than anything,' and being able to take care of your family and then later in life your chosen family, your friends and loves ones. Yeah, so that to me was part of the early, when the flame was lit for that.
Amy: Thank you for giving me so much detail around your childhood. It's always so helpful to help me understand all of the ways that you've evolved into being who you are now. So take us to Japan. What did you pivot to? And what survival skills were kicking in for you at that time?
Ana: During that period I had a friend of mine who was two years senior from high school that was also living in Japan, which was one of the strengths that gave me to at least know that I would probably be okay by moving here because I had a network. I ended up moving with him to the Japan seaside town known as Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, Kanazawa. And it's now known as the sister city of Kyoto. At that point when I moved there, there were only five foreigners that were living in the entire city.
Amy: What?
Ana: I was one of the five.
Amy: Whoa.
Ana: This is in 1990, there were not a lot of foreigners living in Japan per se. And he was a former aspiring Art Center high school grad that ended up also moving to Japan and just ended up starting his own design agency. I worked with him there to sort of get that off the ground, doing early on brand and visual graphic design that later in life I would pick up and move forward into a profession and discipline called Information Design that now pretty much we would say is Interaction Design. But that's how I made that pivot and I made the pivot because I knew that animation wasn't going to be sustaining [0.20.00] I did try one last time a little bit later. I ended up working for a Japanese animation company here called AnimeGO that was doing subtitles for legitimate animation distribution with acquired rights in the Western world. It was there that I came across an opportunity to go to work for Wired Magazine Japan. At this point we were using Macintosh's Quadra 850AVs to do a lot of the home brewed digital subtitling for the animation work and I learned a lot more about platform, especially the Apple platform and the software solutions that were available then. Even some basic hackery. That led me into getting a role into the development and design of modern software at Wired which was publishing a series of CD-ROM titles that they had acquired from the UK by an artist called Dorling Kindersley and these titles were being culturally localized. So I got to learn a lot about ethnography and cultural localization that we would call Design Anthropology these days, and understanding the means of how you can't just do literal translation, you have to adapt it and make it motivation for the individual, too. Especially trying to get people to consume Western culture because a lot of the titles were about the history of pirates, or the history about European engineering and steam engineering and stuff like that.
While I was doing that at Wired, we were launching the first few issues of Wired Japan before Condé Nast ever owned it and that got me connected in the industry as a whole and learning a lot more about how to go to press at scale with a lot of the publishing industry. It was through that experience and knowing that taking these CD-ROM titles and the interactivity, that there was a whole industry here and there was going to be a portfolio of software by big companies that were going to be building these experiences. That led me eventually to leaving Wired and going to work for Macromedia Japan as one of the founding members of Macromedia. For those who don't know who Macromedia is, Macromedia was an acquired company by Adobe but long before the acquisition took place, it was a company that really created interaction design. It created CD-ROMs, interactive DVDs, it created web medium that was called Director that eventually evolved into a product called Flash, that for many decades was a predominant animation interactive media choice for many on the internet.
Amy: Wow, so as the internet is growing up around you, you're right there building it.
Ana: Yeah. (Laughs) Being in the thick of it and seeing how creators here in Japan and big software companies like ourselves were able to build solutions and find solutions that never prior existed, and creating them and bringing them to the market with the partnership and help of the people we were building them for, it was really rewarding.
Amy: What was the reward for you? Was it satisfying your curiosity? Was is the people you were working with? Was it putting your problem solving skills to work? Or was it all of it?
Ana: The biggest satisfaction for me was in the development process which was truly a co-development process with the community, designing for people like myself, was seeing their reaction in real time. We would typically hold focus groups and when we would go to a focus group we would hear from them about their frustrations of existing defects, bugs that are in the software, or aspirations of future feature development and design asks. A lot of times we would have an engineer with us and we would be able to hack up a semi-functional version of what they had just said in a matter of minutes. I'd go, 'do you mean like this,' (laughs) and we'd turn the laptop around and show them. They would be like, 'yeah, that's amazing.' 'We'll put it in the next version.'
Amy: (Laughs) Yeah, that's so cool. From Macromedia, how long were you there?
Ana: I was at Macromedia for about two and a half, three years.
Amy: Okay, and then you go to MetaDesign Agency, are you still living fulltime in Japan? Are you coming back and forth?
Ana: Back and forth.
Ana: I went to work for Meta because I was inspired by Erik Spiekermann. At that time I had been a fan of Stop Stealing Sheep which a lot of us live by and I still highly recommend that book for anyone that is interested or fascinated by type or typography. I wanted to see what it was like on the agency side from the consulting side, and one of the things that I did miss that caused me to eventually leave and go back to one of the larger companies, was budget. It wasn't a life/work balance thing. It was more just being able to have budget to do things where you didn't feel like you needed to possibly red line your energy to get something out and done. A lot of people thrived off of that adrenaline as you probably have spoken to, like that work from the agency side. Life/work balance wasn't necessarily a thing in the industry back in that period.
Amy: (Laughs) No. No, it wasn't.
Ana: So I ended up deciding to leave Meta and going to work for Adobe. At this point Adobe had not acquired Macromedia yet. One of the last projects that I worked on at Macromedia was the creation of Dreamweaver 1.0. It was the first really rich, visual Wiziwig authoring tool for the web at that time. One of the aspirations for us as the product design team and designing that particular piece of software, was a German company by the name of GoLiveSystems and they had a product called CyberStudio that at the point Adobe had just acquired. They had come and they had asked me would I be interested in helping lead the future development of what Adobe would call [0.30.00] their first professional web authoring tool. They already had had PageMill and SiteMill which were early Wiziwig authoring tools, but this was the first competitor from an Adobe perspective to go and compete with the hand coders that were lovers and loyalists to Dreamweaver. I went into doing that at Adobe. Talking about that growth mindset and wanting to learn something new, at this point I went and moved from actually doing product design into product management. Learning about the business side, really grass-rooting my own first MBA of how do you build and research and understand the total adjustable market for the needs of a given multi-million-dollar investment and not knowing you're going to reap those rewards until you start selling it. So that was really fun, I didn't think that I would be so excited about business until I had moved to Adobe and moved into this new role.
Amy: What do you think did excite you? Was it a little bit like you were adding more parameters to your creative project?
Ana: At that time, I don't think we used this. We might have used this word, but it wasn't. It's definitely a buzzword these days. It was defining and understanding that there are metrics, these floating data points that are above everything in the world. That if you can quantify and classify and bring into visibility, you then can tie them to justification of why something should be funded or why something should be built, or why someone needs something that isn't in existence yet. And I think that part of the research and development, along with the stuff that I talked about during Macromedia which was the co-creation, the focus groups in building these experiences, I found so fascinating in that aspect of my time at Adobe.
Amy: Getting those data points, is that also an extension of design anthropology?
Ana: It is now. Yeah, absolutely.
Amy: Okay.
Ana: And I think that from an Adobe perspective they deeply cared about the markets that they were operating in and the languages that they had their software available. It wasn't just forcing a function of 'here's a Western feature set that happens to have a gooey string of German or Japanese.' It was more like, 'what specific versions or what specific features can we add that are unique to this market?' So German as an example, which is used in the software development world as a baseline string set for making sure when you do UI design for the interface, that you have long text fields that can be adaptable for very long German words. That's sort of one way you could approach accessible design, especially from a linguistic perspective. (Laughs) And then from a Japanese perspective which was an emerging market at that time, Adobe knew and the world was coming to know, that it wasn't necessarily about interactivity any more. It was about mobile computing. It was going to be about mobile experiences. So at that point Japan had the world's most technologically advanced telephony platform here in the country. They also had the most advanced phone so they were doing 3G video conferencing built into their phones. They had an interactive platform called i-mode that was based in Compact HTML and no one had a solution for authorings except for hand coding. It was one of my 'aha' moments. I was like, 'what if we built a gooey system for this?' Emoji came from i-mode by the way, we have emoji because of what Docomo did and how Docomo created the emoji which is what the word originated from, from i-mode platform.
Amy: Wow.
Ana: So I created the world's first professional emoji palette that allowed you to have a visual representation of all the available emoji at that time and you would be able to click it and insert the code, the syntax into your source code so when you're building a cHTML page, you would have a richer experience than just text and hyperlinks. This caught on in Europe, Nokia and Sony Ericsson were also full-on board with trying to bring cHTML over to Europe at that time. Apple started at that period also doing experience of doing research on what could a platform like at that point, Mac OS consumed through whatever browsers they were running in their operating system at that time, the cHTML source code because it was so desktop focused at that point in time. That led to the adoption of emoji in Europe and the evolution of the Nokia Series 60 platform of devices and Sony Ericsson platform [0.35.00] that became the predecessor to what eventually would become Mobile Compute and got Apple very interested in the space during that period.
Amy: And there is a transition to Apple. What made that happen for you?
Ana: So while at Adobe, I was part of a two group team that was looking into how can we strengthen and secure Adobe's position in the future of authoring, especially for pervasive computing and mobile. There were two camps, I was part of a camp that was focused on open-source because we believed that the open-source approach to co-development of features and road maps was better than a closed proprietary system. The other camp that was inside the MNA team was focused on acquiring Macromedia and acquiring Macromedia specifically for Flash. So we ended up losing out unfortunately at that period of time, but our gut instincts were spot on and many of us that were part of the M&A team focused to acquire a Swedish company named Ikivo that would have had scaleable vector graphics, authoring solution for open web for mobile in the particular. We ended up all leaving and eventually finding our way, most of us found our way back to Apple to work on various different components and aspects of the operating system or iPhone itself. So that's basically how I came to know one infinite loop in Cupertino, (laughs) or as I like to say, 'supertino' (laughter) where Apple is based and got to be part of the amazing multitude of projects and got to know some amazing, wonderfully beautiful, creative people. Some are still there. Some have gone off and done other things. Yeah, so that was my journey into Apple.
Amy: You had a smile on your face when you were talking about the wonderful people that you worked with at Apple. Was that a really good time in your life?
Ana: It was. It was also a very hard time. A lot of us worked really, really, probably some of the hardest that we've ever worked in our career because we were so passionate about what we were doing. We were also trying to please Steve and the other executives that were supporting us in our endeavor, but it was also a time of incredible growth. Learning about graphics compute technologies and hardware acceleration and bringing typography and smooth animations into the fold, which was the particular project that I was working on. It was a fusion of digital graphics animations with operating system development with tactile human interaction output. So the platform aspect of the iPhone that I helped create with my team was code named cassoulet and it was a combination of a technology we created called Core Animation combined with what you all know as Safari which is the web kit engine. That really brought UIkit into a modern context and UIkit is still used. A lot of those technologies of fluidity, high frame rate, very yummy in and out interaction snippets are still used today in the Apple Vision Pro. UIkit is living very strong inside of that.
Amy: I'm not in the tech world so you're speaking another language to me, but I find it so intoxicating. At the same time I'm really struck by just how much your work has filtered out into society and affected me, everyone, so fundamentally. That's pretty exciting. (Laughs)
Ana: Hindsight, right?
Amy: Yeah.
Ana: A couple of things that we worked on, we didn't know would have this level of a societal impact. A lot of [0.40.00] us have talked about this, that we're part of the old team, we never knew that our mobile phones would create autonomy and connectivity and opportunity in the ways that it has become. But at the same time it's also from an ethical perspective, one of our issues in our lives. The mobile phone has caused an attack on human cognition with notifications and now that's being addressed in a lot of the more modern instances of Android and iPhone, but we had no idea. All we were really striving for was 'I want to be able to pull my phone out,' and it's what we tested against. 'Can I read the New York Times in my pocket.
Amy: Wow. Were you still at apple when the first... I know you were on the original iPhone design team, but were you still there when it launched?
Ana: I had just left when it launched. I was in the crowd with my team at Moscone when Steve pulled it out of his pocket.
Amy: Wow.
Ana: So I got to celebrate with everyone. But I was on another endeavor.
Amy: Do you want to tell me about that?
Ana: (Laughs) Yeah. (Laughs) That person I worked with is now in jail. (Laughter) Some of you may have watched the Disney+ television series called The Dropout and I believe there's still a movie coming out soon from Apple's studios based on the book Bad Blood. But I was at Theranos and I left Apple just before the iPhone came out along with a handful of dear friends and colleagues to join a biotech start-up that was set to disrupt the clinical testing industry which was billions of dollars. It still is hundreds of billions of dollars. And at the same time build the path forward for what then was known as Medicine 2.0, the future of healthcare, especially personalized healthcare and private healthcare from the comfort of your own home. I had a fateful discussion with one of my friends who was on the board at Theranos, Avie Tevanian, and he had asked if it would be of interest for me to work on something where I could again grow, learn to lead industrial design, mechanical, electrical engineering, along with operating system experiences. I decided to learn a little bit more so I had a meeting with Elizabeth and that very first meeting we were at Palo Alto [0.45.00] and she's done a lot of harm to the world, but she's pretty genuine in terms of her energy. And that energy, the closest thing I could say, it's the reality distortion field that Steve created and I think a lot of entrepreneurs have to have. Having founded my own hardware start-ups, those that are entrepreneurial in nature have to create that field of energy. I won't call it a reality distortion field because that's bad. It can be bad. It could cause you to not see the truth. But you create this energy field around yourself that to a degree is your force field, it's your armor that allows you to take your vision and your drive forward and it protects you in that journey. Elizabeth had that energy, had that enthusiasm, had that drive. At that time the way she had described her own upbringing, having gone and lived in China to study Chinese, and learning about nanofluidics and the medical engineering sciences, I thought was super fascinating. I saw a lot of myself in her and the rest is history. We kind of know what happened and it's well documented in the New York Times bestselling book as well. It's on television, soon may be a movie as well.
Amy: Yes, okay. So we know what happened four months after starting there with your team. You realized that shady, unethical shit was going down and?
Ana: People were dying, yeah.
Amy: That's awful.
Ana: Like fourth stage oncology patients, University of Tennessee. Yeah, it was pretty gnarly.
Amy: Not many of us have been in that position. Can you describe for me what it felt like emotionally, physiologically, when you realize this whole endeavor is toxic and you need to do something?
Ana: When I first heard about this I was in a bit of disbelief. 'How could we? How could this possibly be happening.' It was brought to my attention by, now publicly acknowledged Adam Vollmer who was our mechanical engineering lead at the time for the Edison Device who had disclosed it to me and asked me if I could bring it to Elizabeth's attention and see why we're doing this and if I could get her to stop it. It was in that moment when hearing Elizabeth try to justify what was happening and saying that we were all going to become rich and we would all benefit from this and this is just a speed bump on the road of great discovery and development. I think if anyone is in a situation like that, and this was the first foray into setting my gut instinct, my baseline for unethical behavior, is that you know it's not right. I think we know this from just the way we're brought up by our parents and we know that it shouldn't be happening to the individuals that are being affected and impacted by this. You see the disgust and disdain from Edmond Ku in The Dropout on Disney+. He and I are friends and when we were commiserating about that many years later, it still brings back a very visceral feeling inside of us. And I think that if anyone experiences that, which I hope many of you do not, but it is a learning moment and I think you fundamentally are changed forever by going through something like that. While it is incredibly painful and will have a long lasting impact both on you psychologically and emotionally, I think you can turn that into a superpower. It's like Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book Blink, about honing your gut instinct. It became an early warning system that later in life I also discovered throughout my journey.
Amy: And I know you're doing a lot of work now around AI and ethics involving AI. We'll talk more deeply about that, but it does seem like you've been able to convert this into a superpower and now you're applying that superpower.
Ana: It's the ethicality. It's the fear and the hope and the aspiration that I think is part of not only the work that is happening in AI right now, but it could be anything. It could be automotive design. Are you designing a future vehicle that may have a defect? And if that defect is overlooked and you still want to ship that platform, it will have impact on somebody. Aviation, same thing. Food industry, same thing. Ethics touches everything, especially AI. (Laughter)
Amy: Well yes, because then AI filters out and touches everything and sooner than we can even comprehend it will be being deployed in all of those industries you just mentioned and daily life. If it's not ethical in its essence then it's just going to compound and exponentially magnify the unethical part of it. Okay, but you're a techno optimist (laughs) so we're not going to be alarmist right now. So the Theranos experience, it's really powerful to see you dramatized in The Dropout and to make such a bad-assed statement in the moment and you end up on the right side of that history but I understand it's traumatic and you've been working through it ever since.
Ana: Thirteen years I was unable to talk about.
Amy: Oh my gosh.
Ana: Because were under NDA.
Amy: No, silencing somebody makes it so hard to process.
Ana: Just let that set in for a moment, 13 years until the first insider, what I call generation three at Theranos leaked out. Yeah, and then we were slowly feeling confident we could say and to talk about the experiences that we have lived.
Amy: Oh my gosh.
Ana: And still even up until the point when she was convicted, a lot of were in fear of what type of retribution would she have towards any of us that were now self-identifying in our own sharing of our lived experiences.
Amy: Wow. Well there's that bravery that kicked in, again. Along with your gut instincts and your ethics. I'm glad you're taking care of yourself. Thirteen years of silence though, is trauma in and of itself because it starts the processing. It does.I'm sorry for that.
Ana: (Laughs) It's all good. During that 13 year period. There were a few of us that would get together from the first and second generation during the point where we were all silenced and muzzled, and we would talk through stuff about what we're hearing and what's going on over there still. They would get together on El Camino. Across from Palo Alto High there was a restaurant there and we would have these meals and share updates with one another, so we at least were conducting individual therapy amongst ourselves.
Amy: Okay, good. I love a tight support network, (laughs) shared experience. So from there I'm just going to list it off. You go to Sony. Then you become a founder entrepreneur, zero360, Mono Ohm?
Ana: Yeah.
Amy: I think I handled an early prototype of the Runcible.
Ana: You might have. We received an award from Cool Hunting back when we were getting ready to ship it. It was amazing well received and that's an unfortunate story. So some former pre-Apple, Apple, post-Apple associates of mine, friends of mine, got together. We wanted to do another hardware start-up and the thinking was [0.55.00] how can we create something that allowed us to keep our heads up in the real world and stay attuned and intent to those that were having a meaningful relationship or conversation with. Versus the smartphones causing us to pull our heads down and go into the death scroll. We had some amazing backers for this particular piece of hardware and there's photos on my LinkedIn profile, but it was an heirloom electronic. It had natural material for the outer housing, we were using woods and metals and ceramic outer housing. It had a state-of-the-art Sony image sensor that was in the iPhone at the time, was inside the camera and had this delightful round user experience that you literally physically would rotate the device in a circular motion that would allow you to zoom in and zoom out on photographs and use the circular interaction to scroll throughout the operating system for the device.
Amy: Wow.
Ana: But unfortunately it was ahead of its time. We were ready to go to market with it. We had the backing and funding from KDDI AU here in Japan that was going to be part of their Design Series line of which they had worked previously with Mark Newson on the original Talby talk like and then Naoto Fukasawa on the Infobar and we were going to be the third phone in that platform and I was super honored that what we had created was going to be part of that portfolio.
Amy: Yes.
Ana: Especially being a fan of Japan. Google was in the midst of getting ready to release their original Wear OS for the Android platform and they were going to introduce a watch. They saw us releasing a phone with the round display and we had made a decision during the development process to move away because of a technical difficulty using Firefox operating system, to use Android open source which is Android core based but not the full Android stack that you would find in a Pixel that has access to the PlayStore because there's obligations you have to agree to use Maps and Play and all the other additional Android apps. We were going to build a lot of those applications ourselves and when Google found out about that, because they were getting ready to announce Wear, they asked us if we would switch to Wear versus Android open source. We were like, 'we don't want this to be a tethered accessory, we want this to be a full, independent mobile phone.'
Amy: Yeah.
Ana: We were going to release it to great fanfare in Europe and in Japan and they ended up coming in and strong arming our manufacturing partner, Kyocera at the time, that was going to produce the device for us. We didn't want them to lose their white label phone production for Google and so we ended up pulling out of developing the device and having to essentially bow to Google. Later they were brought before the Japanese Ministry of Information and Technology under unbecoming business practices that they also faced in Europe. So in a way karma was served in the end, but we ended up having to shut down the company. And still today when I put that prototype into someone's hand or I talk about it, I get the reaction you just had right now which is so meaningful to me and I want to say thank you.
Amy: I wish it existed.
Ana: Never say never, right? Never say never.
Amy: Right, okay. (Laughs) Just put it out into the universe. (Laughs)
Ana: Yeah.
Amy: From there you go to Samsung, Meta, Microsoft, and now you're at IDEO. Do you want to tell me about that arc?
Ana: At a high level, again following that theme of growth mindset, moving into Samsung I wanted to learn how do you build an amazing platform and experience that has never been done before in such a rapid amount of time. We created the frame television platform in six months. So seeing how you can go from silicon to a hardware platform based on a Seraph platform originally, to creating multiple version of what [1.00.00] possibly a frame might look like, translucent or not, that was amazing and growing right there. I learned and I cut my teeth early on with some basic AI work there with natural language and speech technology with the Bixby acquisition. So when I moved to Facebook I was able to further deepen that knowledge, working very closely with the Facebook AI research team now known at Meta AI and the applied machine learning team which was the AI surface development team that built AI across all of the products, Instagram, WhatsApp, Big Blue aka Facebook, the main app. And it was during my time at Facebook that Cambridge Analytica took place and the data breaches with the personal information that lead to the 2016 election fiasco. At that point I wanted to find a company in the world that was doing ethical, amazing work in AI, and that's what led me to Microsoft.
Honestly, my time at Microsoft and getting to see and understand how Satya works and the leadership team there, it was such a growing and amazing period of my experience. I recently gave a talk here with the president of Figma Japan, and one of the questions that was asked to me was if I could name the most favorite company I've ever worked for and why and I couldn't just name one. I named a couple and I put them in order, and I put Sony as being the first, before Microsoft actually. And Microsoft being number two, and Apple being three. The reason why I put Sony first is that they are truly craftspeople and they care about the design and execution. You can see that in the new Honda and Sony collaboration car. Microsoft would be number one because they do amazing work with surface and the operating system and everything that they do. But I put Microsoft number two which is a very low number one, because I really love the culture and I love the community and I love the ethicality of how everyone operates. They truly bring to heart the values that represent Microsoft and Satya asks everyone to espouse those particular values.
I honestly would still be at Microsoft if it wasn't for during Covid, moving to Japan, and then working kind of bonkers hours, 3:30 in the morning until 12 noon. And after having played a role in the birth of my son, my littlest son and coming back off of maternity leave, I was like, 'I maybe want to find something local.' That's why I find myself today at IDEO. And a little bit of a bittersweet story there, it's the right place at the wrong time per se. There was a global decision that was made to shut IDEO Tokyo which has a beautiful heritage all the way going back to Naoto Fukasawa who was the original creator of IDEO Tokyo. We're shutting down the studio here and we're moving a lot of that work over to North America, but that's also opened up the next chapter. 'What and how might I and the team that I'll be working with, find a way to uplift Japanese entrepreneurs and craftspeople and designers here, and help them become more known at a greater scale?' That's something definitely I'm very passionate about and I want to start doubling down into the upcoming year. Because a lot of the times, these individuals that are making these objects or the experiences, don't speak English and haven't had the ability to share their journey and to share their experiences with the Western world. That's something that I'm going to take a lot of heart in with the team that I am building what we'll come in 2024 with, and yeah, I'm looking forward to sharing that with the rest of the world.
Amy: So in terms of your creative process, I'll give you sort of a multiple choice and you can talk about which one you want to go into in detail. I know that you have said that you start your creative projects with a kind of ethnography or design anthropology and that all your work is grounded in humanity and empathy, and I love that. But what does that mean for you? Like what is the starting point for you?
Ana: Yeah, let's unpack that. Let me talk a little bit about why now is so important, especially in the age of AI. As we just discussed, before IDEO, while I was at Microsoft, I was shipping artificial intelligence and really working on building the future of computing as a service for Gen Z and the Alpha Generation. This is really critical because they are the future, you know. They are the ones that are going to take society and take our planet forward. And their demands and expectations are very different than ours. They believe in a world where experiences are literally going to be play, pause, and resume on a magnitude of surfaces. In some cases not even having a surface, it's ambient computing, it's spoken. Think the movie Her, right. Which is why I find what I will be doing in 2024 so exciting, it's like building upon that and having been hands on, working and leading. So often in my career from the edge for the past 29+ years, shipping experiences that are beloved around the world, it's being able to leverage and celebrate and talk to these individuals who are all around aspects of the country, aspects of the world, being able to talk to individuals with wide ranging backgrounds and disciplines. Whether it's machine learning and research, to chip design, to mechanical software and hardware engineering, to design anthropology, to product design, to industrial design and CMF, and pull that all together and be able to help consult with and help promote others that are doing this work in the form of almost a platform whisperer. I really, truly feel that that is a superpower of mine.
Amy: Yeah, that's a good word for it.
Ana: And that aspiration is to guide and explore and build and ship and measure these experiences and these products and future services that really fundamentally drive behavioral change throughout the world. And if I come back to my grounding principles, human, simple, and authentic, for me the humanity of what it is that we do and the first thoughts that we have towards creating a new endeavor or thinking about a new experience or a product, it's really distilling it down, being reductive, [1.10.00] breaking it down to the simplest forms, to even less than an MVP. And then figuring out is that just right. Does it feel innately human? And I always use the analogy of designing tableware, a spoon. A spoon is one of the simplest, most beautiful crafted objects in the world to me because it's incredibly intimate. It's something you sustain yourself with and you put it into your body and you feel safe as you eat with the spoon. Then from a simplistic perspective it's being reductive and getting it down to just what matters. You can always be additive to it, but that redaction is really critical. Then being authentic and having a unique point of view and being strong and convicted with that point of view, I think it's a superpower that many people need to learn. And it doesn't mean to say that every idea you have will be original..
Especially now with AI and Gen AI, everything is a remix, but it's your unique perspective, point of view, your lens, that makes it authentic and no one else in the world had that 'aha' moment or that aspect of it. So the human, simple, authentic aspect of the creation process really kind of brings everything full circle. In every aspect you're thinking about, sketching, ideating, getting feedback and testing it, and then throwing things out and putting things in, and doing the information loop over and over again, it's the traditional product development mindset, but you just have to truly make sure you do it. Because if you have a point of view on something that is in your heart, that means that you will have a unique point of view on someone else's thing and feedback is so important. The art of crit and being able to receive crit, but also to give constructive crit is so lacking in this industry today. And it's something, please make sure that the future talent that is coming out of RISD and other wonderful institutions, we need to make sure that authenticity, point of view, and the culture and science of crit is so important. So ethical AI is something that you talk a lot about and one of the frame works that I've heard you discuss that is an important way to look at how AI should be developed is global intersectionality. Can you unpack that a little bit? And in doing so, can you also help us understand why it is that you're a techno optimist?
Ana: First and foremost, intersectionality so often, especially in technology companies, they love to use the term and they love to talk about inclusivity or accessibility. In the aspects of doing so, we're doing such a disservice to so many other other populations and so many other people. Intersectionality for me is truly about building and co-creation or creation for the 3% that is often left out and often continues to be marginalized. If you design for that 3%, you have the [1.15.00] ability to truly ensure you're solvent for the 97%. Making sure you're addressing age, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical and cognitive ability, along with so many other variables that we need to consider when we say 'intersectional design, inclusive design.' Especially intersectional design as it relates to AI because so much of the training sets that have been created academically and institutionally in the current big companies, are based on models that are not inclusive, that are based on the past. That's why I love the work that Microsoft is doing along with OpenAI and some of the other companies. In particular, Partnership on AI has a great foundation where when they're thinking about building toward a future of AGI, artificial general intelligence, they're taking into consideration and making sure they're solving for the existing models and data sets that are there. That they truly are fair. That they are reliable. That they do take into consideration privacy and security, and intellectual property rights. That they are intersectional and inclusive, and ideally they are transparent. They're open and the data sets themselves can be reviewed and peer reviewed and provide feedback and be better for it.
And that at the end of the day there's also accountability for the data sets that are being used and that if someone should use something that may cause ill harm for a community or population, that quick accountability can be taken and it can be rendered in a way that it can be fixed very fast. So for me, the aspect of responsible and ethical AI is so important because it's not just about the hard technical aspects of these experiences and the technologies that are being built. It's also about a lot of the liberal arts and the sciences that have to be considered. Anyone that is working in AI today, whether you're an engineer, whether you're a product manager, whether you're a designer, you've got to know more than just about design or engineering or business. You have to think about psychology that is going into the platform you're building. You have to think about the various different modern technologies of computer science. You have to think about the physics and the engineering and the biology, and most important, the liberal arts aspect. The way you're going to interact with these future technologies is written now, spoken in the future, and how we write and how we speak and how we give our whole self into these machines is going to be what will come out as the byproduct of that. If you don't know liberal arts, if you don't know how to be a critical thinker, if you don't know how to speak well or write well in many languages, in many cultures, it could create an output that could be harmful toward a given said population. Then also as an engineer or a product manager or a designer, you have to also learn each other's disciplines. You don't have to be deep an expert into any one of those, but you have to be able to be that T shape, deep generalist. You can do deep in your core expertise, but you have to be able to go wide, talk intelligently, debate intellectually, and work collaboratively from the T shape perspective across data science and machine learning engineering and research science and design anthropology and creating writing and visual communication and human affordance and interaction and product design. And very soon true ambient design, spacial computing. We're so close with humane and the AI clip which is the first foray. Then as you probably have heard with the discussions last week with Sam Altman, one of the reasons that the board got upset at him is because he's in discussions with Johnny Ive to create some new future AI hardware (laughter) and they thought it was a disruption of his time and focus for OpenAI. I'm like, 'oh, there's going to be a lot more interesting hardware on the horizon,' so that's exciting for all of us. (Laughs) That's why I think intersectional design is so important right now in this era of artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence.
Amy: How do we all demand that? As people who aren't in the tech sector, who aren't actually building these products?
Ana: Everything we just discussed, especially where we find ourselves today with AI and AGI, is that it's moving so fast that it's going to require a lot of heavy emotional lifting from all of us to continually stay up to date with the latest and question with what is coming out and work with one another to rally, to raise visibility towards things that we feel is not appropriate or safe for humanity as a whole. I use the word 'humanity,' but really we need to be thinking about greater than human centered design. We need to be thinking about planet centered design. We need to be thinking about what does habitat and the environment with our ecosystem of animals and how is that affected by AI. That's something that came out of the World Design Organization that I attended and spoke at recently here in Tokyo for the 33rd gathering, and that we need to move beyond human centered design to true understanding of how ecology and our planet is affected by AI. Not just from the carbon aspect but also what are the experiences that we're creating and how it will impact other environments.
Amy: Amen.
Ana: And in particular, AI. How AI is used to optimize fishing and the fisheries around the world, that's just one example. I know that there are some brilliant minds here in Japan that are thinking about that, how to do it sustainably, effectively, and also help promote the furthering of the fisheries that exist and making sure that populations don't dwindle. You could say that that could be applied for very many different species on our planet along with the climate conditions that we're facing right now.
Amy: That gets exciting. I can see your optimism there.
Ana: Yeah, a lot of work that has been happening.
Amy: Yeah. Man, thank you so much for this. I feel like completely [1.25.00] enriched and enlightened and I am so grateful for this conversation. It's been really, (laughs) really awesome. Thank you.
Ana: Likewise.
Amy: Write a compelling podcast intro for Clever, with guest Ana Arriola, in the style of Amy Devers. ChatGPT: Amy Devers: Hey there, clever minds! Welcome back to another exciting episode of Clever, where we dive deep into the world of design, creativity, and innovation. I'm your host, Amy Devers, and today we have a true trailblazer with us, someone whose creativity knows no bounds. [Transition sound effect] Amy Devers: Our guest today is none other than the extraordinary Ana Arriola. She's a visionary in the world of design and technology, and her impact can be felt across a myriad of industries. Ana's not just breaking glass ceilings; she's redesigning the entire blueprint. [Background music intensifies] Amy Devers: From her groundbreaking work in user experience at some of the biggest tech giants to her passion for empowering underrepresented voices in the design community, Ana Arriola is a force to be reckoned with. [Transition sound effect] Amy Devers: Today, we're going to uncover the secrets behind Ana's innovative approach to design, the stories that shaped her journey, and the wisdom she's gained along the way. So grab your sketchbooks, your favorite pen, and get ready to be inspired by the one and only Ana Arriola on Clever! [Upbeat music fades out]
Amy: Hey, thanks so much for listening. For a transcript of this episode, and more about Ana, including images of her work, and a bonus Q&A - head to cleverpodcast.com. If you like Clever, there are a number of ways you can support us: - share Clever with your friends, leave us a 5 star rating, or a kind review, support our sponsors, or hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app so that our new episodes will turn up in your feed. We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, er X - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements and bonus content. You can subscribe to our newsletter at cleverpodcast.com to make sure you don’t miss anything. Clever is hosted & produced by me, Amy Devers. With editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven. Clever is a proud member of the Surround podcast network. Visit surroundpodcasts.com to discover more of the Architecture and Design industry’s premier shows.

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

“Go slow, to go fast. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Take care of yourself.” - Tim Schaaff, during our development of PlayStation 4 (codenamed Orbis)

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

Favorite material / Paper, Rhodia 5x5 Dot Grid + Lamy + Rotring

What books are on your nightstand?

Design Science_01, The Design Science Foundation, Naoto Fukasawa
Scaling People, Tactics for Management and Company Building, Claire Hughes Johnson
Seek, How Curiosity Can Transform Your Life and Change the World, Scott Shigeoka
Capsule International Review of Radical Design & Desire Theory (latest season issue)
Noma in Kyoto, Adam Sachs and Robbie Swinnerton, and actress Lily Collins

Disney+ / The Dropout, Ana being played by Nicky Endres

Favorite restaurant in your city?

Noma, Kyoto (pop-up 2023)
Noma, Copenhagen

Who do you look up to and why?

Zaha Hadid, her grit, strength, and future vision for form. My dear friend Patie Moore (who I also look up to as well), who was friends with Zaha told me just after her death, “Zaha would have loved you, and she would have been so proud of the work you did to bring her reference, her math, into your points of view (Parametricism work done during PlayStation 4 development.)

Sudo Reiko, her texture, and material innovation of her fabrics to me will always be awe-inspiring. I love to surround myself with her work.

Tamotsu Yagi, their ESPRIT work, color, whimsy, and geometry have always inspired me, and I often return to their books as a calming refuge.

Ana speaking at the World Design Assembly in Tokyo, 2023

What are the last five songs you listened to?

Buffalo, Mountain Man
Cats, Leah Dou
Nebao, Les Amazones d’Afrique, Mani Keïta
In Manhattan, Nation of Lauguage
Ojitos Lindos, Bad Bunny, Bomba Estereo

Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Mark Zurawinski, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.