Ep4. Joanna Peña-Bickley: Daring to Design a Better Future

Joanna Peña-Bickley: That is where we are. It is a transformational technology that right now is indistinguishable from magic cuz it is so well designed and if used properly will stand to fundamentally transform the way that we work and do things in the world.

Helen Todd: Joanna Peña-Bickley is an inventor and a design technologist, known as the mother of cognitive experience design, named one of Fortune’s most powerful women.

She’s been at the forefront of AI-aided generative design and has created her own framework with principles to ensure that AI enhances humans. Born a dyslexic child in San Antonio, Texas, a thread throughout Joanna’s unlikely career is crafting magical experiences. Whether it was inventing one of the first streaming video players for ABC or designing the first banking app on the Apple Watch for Citibank.

She’s also designed the first smart mobility platform for General Motors, invented new ambient intelligent Alexa devices for Amazon, and also reimagined the world’s mobility for Uber.

A fan of science fiction and a Trekkie at heart, Joanna has always seen the link between fiction and invention. She’s bringing this to Sensory6, her new AI company focusing on making people more resilient through bio-wearable technology and human digital twins. The company is on a mission to augment our intelligence and give us superpowers to adapt.

And in being unapologetically herself, she’s also an avid organizer and advocate for women and girls in design and tech. She co-founded, Designed by Us, a cooperative dedicated to accelerating gender equity in STEAM, which is science, technology, engineering, arts, math, and design education.

Joanna inspired me from the first time I met her at a dinner back in 2016 in New York City, and I couldn’t be more excited to have her on the podcast to inspire you as well.

Today you’ll hear how Joanna thinks about creativity and AI, what shaped her career trajectory, her ethical framework, how we need to embrace, not ban AI, the call for positive AI stories and how she dares to design a better future. Enjoy.

Theme: But have you ever thought, what if this is all just a dream?

Helen Todd: Welcome to Creativity Squared. Discover how creatives are collaborating with artificial intelligence in your inbox, on YouTube, and on your preferred podcast platform. Hi, I’m Helen Todd, your host, and I’m so excited to have you join the weekly conversations I’m having with amazing pioneers in this space.

The intention of these conversations is to ignite our collective imagination at the intersection of AI and creativity to envision a world where artists thrive.

Theme: …just a dream

Helen Todd: Joanna, I am so excited to have you here. Welcome to Creativity Squared.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Thank you so much for having me. You don’t know what, it is such an honor to be here and to be with your audience.

Helen Todd: Oh my goodness. The honor is so mine. Just, like your accolades are so many, but for those who don’t know who we’re listening to, Joanna is an inventor, design technologist and is known as the mother of cognitive experience design and a pioneer in AI-aided generative design, which if you don’t know what this means, we’ll all, we’ll dive into this and all learn together.
But let’s kind of start with your origin story in San Antonio, cuz I think a lot of that has kind of shaped the trajectory of your career.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Absolutely has. So I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. It is a magical place. Let me start with, it is a primary Latino space in the state of Texas. It’s only three hours away from the Mexican border.

It’s really, while Austin believes that it’s the heartbeat of it, I actually believe that San Antonio is the cultural center of Texas because so much and its history has happened there. So I was born and raised there, had a very middle class upbringing. You know, I was brought up by a lawyer and a designer.

Like, those two things are like, pretty magical in themselves that they could coexist in the right, in the same space for a long period of time. But my love for design, and I would say my love for invention and things like that actually, came out of spaces spending time with my dad, Thomas Maspero right?

Our, some of our pastimes would be, is that he would allow me to have like the, those imaginations and like pretend in the backseat of a truck. Yes. Everybody in Texas does drive a truck. We are very much part of that kind of family, right. Whereas my mom built an amazing design career.

She was in the field of construction and started a company, a design firm in our garage and built that over 30 years into a world-class design firm that went from doing residential design to commercial then to government work. And I’m so lucky to still have her with me, right. She’s in her seventies.

She’d get really mad at me for saying that out loud cuz she comes from the generation that they, they’re very protective of their age. And actually I’d say some that I hope that I am both as healthy, and as wise as, as she is in terms of what she has lived through, the journey that she has gone through.

And so for me, San Antonio is that space that was a launching pad, both for my imagination and dreams.

Helen Todd: I was curious how much of this one incident kind of shaped some of your inclusion work. But when you were leaving San Antonio, which as I understand, it was very unusual for someone from a family, a Latino family, to go to Chicago.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Let me start with, nobody leaves a Latino family. I have really, I have to explain this to you, that leaving San Antonio wasn’t about leaving my family. It’s like physically, yes, I needed to go to school. And I realized, and so I will share that story, but I think one of the things I just wanna tap into for all the young Latinas out there, it is, I was both, I’m the oldest, right.

I have a younger sister, who still by the way, lives on the same block, two houses away from my dad and mom. Right. Let’s be very clear, they have recreated the Pueblo right in San Antonio, Texas. And it was in the dream that I would be somewhere on that block and so would my children.

And it was one of the hardest things that I ever had to do, was realizing that the opportunities for somebody who learned and thought like me weren’t going to be contained to what is ultimately a beautiful city. But that I had, you know, aspirations. You know, I, I watched a, a kid of the, the eighties, you watch Working Girl and you see the World Trade Center and you’re like, whoa.
Like that’s a magical place where business and art come together and, you know, and you chase that dream. And so in that, in that journey of leaving Texas, and you know, I talked a little bit, it’s a, it’s a primarily Latino city, so I grew up, actually, I have light skin, those of you on the, that can’t see me.

I am a light-skinned Latina, but my sister and mother are dark-skinned Latinas. Right. I was always the odd person out because I view grew up my grandmother, my mother, my sister, I always envied their beautiful mocha colored skin and said, I want hair like that. I want skin like that. This is what I wanna be. I spent my whole life trying to be that I would cry to my grandmother, Why don’t I look like everybody else?

And I didn’t know it at the time, and I certainly do now, that it was actually a privilege to have that light hair and light skin. And my grandmother in Spanish would tell me, they’ll never see you coming. So you have a, because of those things, you have an undue responsibility.

Right, that your responsibility is, you’re standing on our shoulders now, was it as eloquent as that? And Spanish is always more eloquent, let me tell you. But it was almost a duty, but I never understood what that meant till I left to go to college. So we’re driving, right, from Texas to Chicago. So we’re going from Houston to Chicago and we stop in Memphis.

And the first encounter I ever came and understood that privilege, maybe in a way that I had been hidden from me because I lived in a primarily Latino city. was that not everybody’s Latino and not everybody accepts Latinos. And so we stopped at a place, at a gas station in Memphis, Tennessee. Ladies and gentlemen, this was not the 1963’s, it was 1993.

So in that trip, I go in to use the bathroom. Not a problem. My sister, cuz I, at the time, I had children, young children in the car with us. And, my sister then goes in to use the bathroom and she’s told there is no bathroom. I said, Erica, of course there’s a bathroom. Wait, wait, wait, wait. So I go in and the gentleman says, see ma’am, there’s a bathroom for you, but there isn’t for her.
And that was what I, at that moment, understood what my grandmother said. It was at that moment that I went, wait, what? Where am I? Right. Is this the space that we occupy? And the answer is yes, there is still that level of prejudice in the world, but it also placed a deep understanding of both my responsibility to my family, to my community to be unapologetically Latina.

Because, because of the color of my skin or the actually the lack of color, I am pigmentally challenged. Let’s be clear. Like I look at the other way, the lack of the color was gonna get me into spaces that I wouldn’t have otherwise been. And. Or acceptance in ways that my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my mother maybe never got.

And so while I never walked through life believing in like I was in these spaces because of my gender, this part of it was absolutely my smarts. I did understand that I was there out of a privilege that wasn’t afforded to everyone.

Helen Todd: I grew up in East Tennessee and I witnessed these types of things in my hometown, which, it breaks my heart, that it happened.

And I don’t know a good way how to segue into this, but, to see where you have come and what you have done and the tables that you have sat at, I think is absolutely amazing. And for our listeners and viewers to give some context to like, why Fortune has called you one of the most powerful women, maybe we can give a little bit of a background of kind of your, I think, and you said this in your own words, kind of your unlikely story of going from San Antonio to the amazing design career that you’ve had starting with your first invention, one of the very first streaming video, which is amazing.

So can, can you kinda share a little bit of, yeah, your, your, how you got into the career that you did after that experience?
Joanna Peña-Bickley: So here’s what I will tell you. I come from a place of yes and. And that you, when you are invited to walk through a door, that the worst thing that can happen when you walk through that door is that you’ll learn something, you know.
So if you had asked me at the beginning of that journey leaving San Antonio, if I would be sitting where I am today, I could never have imagined this for me. All of the planning in the world wouldn’t have ever gotten into this space.

But if I kind of take you back to the origins of San Antonio, I was a tinkerer. I was, you know, people would say, well, how does design and invention actually work so well, actually invention is about creativity and putting unlikely things together. And I’m an unlikely thing together. I’m Jewish and I’m Hispanic, not a lot of us. And I’m a woman. You start like Jewish, Hispanic, and a woman.

You know, so I am that unlikely story that happens. And because I was taught to believe in myself, but I was also, I had a lot of hobbies. And one of those hobbies, was, I loved storytelling. I loved, in a way that I think made me a really good journalist. And so I pursued that very early in my high school career.

But I also was a computer nerd at a time when computers were just emerging. Let me just, like, I was born in 1973. I get to go to school during the core of the eighties. I spent my time in malls. I spent like, I was a mall rat. I had a Commodore 64 cause we were not wealthy enough to own an Apple IIe, or an IBM computer.

Like you had to be, rich people got IBMs and Apples. We got Commodore 64s. So it was like the, the cool. But part of that was, finding friends and having friends in my neighborhood. You know, when I watch Stranger Things, I mean just like, give some of your listeners who may be a little bit younger. I’m those kids in Stranger Things on the bikes with the CB radios and the backpacks and the, and the Dungeons and Dragons and things like that.

That was me. I’m the girl in that story. And usually have always been the only girl. In those spaces. You know, I didn’t play with dolls. It just wasn’t my thing. So computers were always at the core of this. And so I was very much self-taught. And when you are dyslexic like I am, you are always hacking systems, hacking systems.

I think at the time when I was earlier, it was actually out of a place of shame. I always wanted to be perceived as smart. I didn’t, nobody tells you when you have, you know, you’re diagnosed with dyslexia or reading disability, like you’re still smart, right? It was, no, we’re going to put you in this special ed class.

So I spent all of my extra time, you know, in school I did not do well. I was, you know, in, in the confines of traditional schooling, I needed tutors. My mom worked, my mom and dad worked really hard to provide that kind of support system for me. And so I. What that did was enabled me to take the knowledge that I had in the way that I learned and apply it in spaces that were far more, I’d say immersive.

And computers were immersive at the time, so, you know, I would listen to books on tape and you know, or audio, right? And so video gaming for me, which is if we think about video gaming is purely simulation, taught me strategy, taught me the things that I would go on to actually utilize in my everyday life.

My parents used to ask, why are you spending so much time on that damn computer? Little did they know, right? That there would be a career in that computer. Right. Little did they know that in teaching myself, fractal art, right, so invented in the 1970s, by an IBM-er that becomes the core of every video game of the 1980s.

And then, you know, fractal art made 3D in the 2000s, ends up being becoming the core technologies that I would work on in, in my life today. So for me, you know, that space of power came from following my heart. I’ve always found that the decisions that I made where I just made ’em with my head, were the wrong decisions.

It’s when I balance what’s in my heart and in the head, right, that have been the smartest decisions. And so, I have always tried to kind of keep that path clear, at least in my head. And it hasn’t always been clear, Helen, like getting on, by the way, had you asked me, I’d been on a list, like a Fortune list or, or spoke at the World Economic Forum or done any of these things, I didn’t even know what the World Economic Forum was as a middle, you know, middle class kid from San Antonio, Texas.

But I found amazing stewards in my life, and throughout my career who saw value in me and some value in investing their time in me and sponsored my progress forward in ways that have completely changed my life.

And there have been lots of people in that journey. So I would look and say to you and to listeners everywhere is that, you know, innovation and invention is a team sport. You never do it alone. And I’ve always found when I was at my best, it was cuz I had a team of people I trusted and ultimately were friends, like became friends because we were all in pursuit, not of just having fun, but in something bigger than ourselves.

Helen Todd: Yeah, and just to give a little biographical information, it’s, you’ve, for our listeners, you’ve worked at companies, you know, little ones that people might have heard of, like Amazon, Uber, worked on well, Amazon Alexa specifically.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Yeah.

Helen Todd: And also IBM. So, you know, just a few small, little companies out there that you’ve really helped be at the design forefront of on that end.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Helen, and being at those companies, whether it was Uber, it was Amazon, it was IBM, right? Or even in my days on Madison Avenue working with WPP or Wunderman, along that journey, those are great brands and they’re phenomenal names, but I learned something from every single one of them.

And they often came through untraditional methods, like the method of me getting in, I said getting in. It’s almost like when you get into these companies, getting into IBM was cuz somebody believed in an idea that I had, right?

And believed that I was gonna be the right leader to come in and bring that idea to life. And so you never, I always look at that as a place of both privilege and that it’s an honor to go in there. But you know, when you think about an idea, it’s something on a piece of a paper and I shake up so that I’ve got kind of my ideas sketchpad here.

And you, you want to enter these spaces with the intentionality of learning. And so every one of those places and steps in that journey was a place of learning. And I have always believed in learning through a series of questions is what if, almost what if scenarios, which is what makes me a good designer, because I’m willing to explore things that make most people very uncomfortable.
But as a science fiction guru, right? Who watched Star Trek late at night in San Antonio, Texas, and still to this day watch Star Trek the old episodes, because to me there is a link between fiction and invention. And that link is, is that it’s about dreaming about what is possible. Right, and moving past the fear and apathy that comes out of fear, right?

To be able to work on things that can deliver a better life to someone, a better user journey, a better customer journey, a better, not just outcome for the company, but ultimately society.

And as I reflect backwards, that’s manifested in very different ways at different spaces in my lifetime. And, the fact that people recognize me now as a part of that journey in computing or you know, the mother of cognitive experiences, I’ll never forget somebody like just said that while I walked on this stage one day. And that certainly wasn’t in the script. And I didn’t name myself. I’ve somebody, you know, used to say, well, you know, she’s like the Jony Ives of IBM.

And I remember turning and saying, no, I’m the Joanna Peña-Bickley of I B M. Jony Ives is phenomenal. He’s a beautiful human being, incredibly smart, has done great things for the world, but I just wanted to be me and kind of unapologetically be me as a designer. And so when I think about my trajectory through innovation and design, I hold two truths together in a way that’s, I think an important tension is that in being a really good leader, that it’s not about just accepting the one idea, but it’s actually pursuing the three other ideas that might be right as well.

And looking at it from humbling yourself to say, it’s not always about your idea, but it’s about all the ideas that are in the room of the really smart people that come to bear in your life.

Helen Todd: I love that, and I love how science fiction has informed a lot of your imagination. And just because you’ve mentioned it before, in terms of like the Jetsons, Star Trek, can you talk about maybe some early influences in the sci-fi world? And you had mentioned a book too when we spoke earlier and that I wanted to make sure to, to write down.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: So, let me start with, you know, I came of age when computers were coming of age, so I feel like that I’m aging with computing. Although I think sometimes computing’s getting far more smart than I have cognitively, we can have a whole conversation about that as a human being. But so, sci-fi to me isn’t just the, you know, the Star Treks and the Star Wars is of the world.

You know, it is about thinking about the future and what the world could be like. And for me, that started with the Jetsons. And you know, thinking a little bit about that. And I will tell you, I was so influenced by Star Trek. I wanted to be a hra and so I wasn’t maybe really pursuing, I always look back and go, if you were reflecting and writing a book about yourself, what would that be?
It’s like a part of my journalism was like Uhura was the Chief Communications Officer of the Starship Enterprise. It didn’t mean she was like about branding, you know, what she was doing. She would like tilt her earbud and she was tuning into the conversations of the universe. How powerful is that? Like how cool is that?

So Lieutenant Uhura, right, was and her storyline of being a woman of color, right in that who worked and pursued great science on behalf of humanity and space was something that I just looked and went, that could be me someday. But I wouldn’t tell you how I get there. And so a part of that, you know, part of the being dyslexic was that reading books with lots of text was really tough for me.
And so reading comics was actually the way that I learned to write. It was the storytelling that I really loved the most. And so I stumbled on to a number of comics that were done out of the vein of Arthur C. Clark, Arthur C. Clark, great writer, inventor, ultimately goes on to inform 2010 space, I’m sorry, 2001: Space Odyssey, and its many iterations.

I hold one of his books in my hand today. It’s called Profiles of the Future that I have kept on my desk. It was actually written in the 1960s. And I got the, there’s not a lot of copies of this book around anymore, but here he actually talks about, being a futurist and being, you know, talking about extraterrestrial worlds or being able to work in space and what that meant, for the, the passenger, the writer, in the short term, in the midterm, in the long term, right.

He did the future of transport. He did a number, like every chapter in here is like the future of the brain and the body, the future of, you know, invisibility and, and how we think about these and also the ethics behind them all. And one of his core tenets, right? One of those laws inside of this book is that there becomes a point when introduced, some technologies are indistinguishable from magic, right?

And, as somebody who loved magician shows, David Copperfield, who I now consider a friend, that I’ve had the opportunity to meet, we share this in common, right, that technology has a distinct connection to magic, not from the illusion place, although a lot of the design that we create today is illusionary, right?

You talk about doom scrolling, you talk about the interactions, micro interactions. There is a bit of illusion and sleight of hand in order to bring you information. A great interface right, is not about revealing every mechanism it took to to get you the information at a screen. Great design actually removes that to bring you clarity into what you’re trying to do.

And so I believe that so much of that and that early comic book reading and these books have fueled my belief that to be a good designer, you have to balance wonder and rigor, right? The wonder of dreaming of a better future for the planet, for the, your community, for yourself, right?

But the rigor, right, that it goes about to roll up your sleeves and actually make that future happen. The scientific pieces up that, right? Because so much of that science fiction was informed by scientists to say, in the future, if we took this part of the technology or a genome, we could spin it off and do these things.

Those were the what if questions. And so when I think about, in my days at Amazon, when I’d sit down to write a PRFAQ, so what’s a PRFAQ? It is this really special mechanism that is very Amazonian that you write. It is a future state press release. It is a promise to the customer, right? That so much of that passion for science fiction and making it a reality, was put on paper and ended up on a, you know, a product roadmap and influencing my peers, to get excited about creating something that we could do together.
And so for me, that’s something, you know, I have always thrived in spaces that had people that were like me, right? We love that sci-fi piece that we could at lunch trade and have really deep arguments around when, you know, when working in space, what will architecture look like, and how should that be?

And, and will, what is the, will there be an international, or sorry, interplanetary language? How dare we think it, you know, really be English? Why, why would it be, why wouldn’t it be Spanish? Could it be Hebrew? Right? We don’t know. Could, could it be Martian? We don’t know. Right? But finding the what ifs and exploring those what ifs in a manner that gets you to a product and gets you to a result is my favorite sandbox to play in.

Helen Todd: I loved it. And there was so much in what you just said that well, we’ll have to dive into the different components. And I know you have said before that what is magic except for something that science hasn’t proven yet.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Mm-hmm.

Helen Todd: I love that. And speaking of science fiction, I think one project that I kind of fangirled out about once I learned that you worked on it, was a project with the Wachowskis. And like, how cool is it to go from science fiction lover to actually working on a project. So just because I’m totally biased and such a huge fan of them, can you share what you did for that project specifically?

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Sure, sure, sure, sure. So, while I was living in Chicago, I had my own company, and BBG was the name of that company. I had phenomenal creatives around me. And in that company, which was so exciting, we had the opportunity to go pitch Warner Brothers and Joel Silver.

So let me start with my client was Joel Silver, not the Wachowskis because Joel Silver owns, like all the licensing, he is a powerhouse. Learned so much from him and just even being, by the way, in my early twenties, in a room where I’ll never forget, he had just moved into Frank Sinatra’s old office on the Warner Brothers lot.

Like, so just the fact that when we walked in, he had a button on his desk that opened the door. Like that was the beginning of a sci-fi journey I wasn’t expecting and was so fortunate to be along. So in there, we go in and we pitch what ultimately became the Matrix game, right? And the Matrix game was all about picking up the phone.

I mean, the movie, the storyline was core to Hello, you’re in the Matrix. And so it was at a time we were working with voice technology, voice XML, to be specific. And we go in and we pitch a game idea that could be interwoven and you could take these phenomenal journeys through the Matrix because why wouldn’t you want to play yourself through the Matrix?

Are we living, the core of the, the Matrix story asks us, are we living in a simulation? Right, which is a pondry. I will tell you, I have professionals that tell you, we’re living in a simulation. What I’m telling you, if this is somebody’s simulation, rewind. Like, we’ve got some work to do. It is an unfinished simulation.

And so we created the, the first voice game, right. And we embedded it in Samsung in a Samsung mobile phone looked like, just like Keanu Reeves is this, but it was, like I said, early days. Voice XML, voice recognition, and then, using audio design and, you know, and, and special effects so that when you were on the phone, you know, it gave you guiding narratives that you could dive into the Matrix.

And so we got to work with voice actors, you know, all of the, the actors that were a part of the original series, to, when they came to do the redux version of the film, we launched with that film. So not only we get to create, do the industrial design and something like the exciting things around the film, the most important thing that I think that like there was actually bringing something that was relegated to telephony, right?

Old school telephony, voice recognition, like press one to talk to a banker, right? And we applied that to entertainment and got really excited about it because we were playing with XML. And here was another time where, you know, we’re hacking things together and we’re hacking them in a way that created customer experience that was ultimately used by millions of fans across the world.

Helen Todd: Well as a complete fan girl of the Wachowskis, I love that story. But one thing that you had mentioned about Star Trek that really stood out too is about Lieutenant Uhura and how important representation was, or her character being a woman of color was to you and what that meant. So I’d love to hear more about that and also how you kind of have embodied that in the teams that you’re building and your outlook when it comes to your work too.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: So let me just, so Lieutenant Uhura, who was portrayed by Nichelle Nichols, right, also went on to create a program about women in space and women in technology. You know, when I think about what Lieutenant Uhura meant to me, you know, you would’ve thought when she passed, most recently, actually, she recently just passed at 89, you would’ve thought that like a family member had passed.

It was just like a, so, a soft moment for me because she had done so much, but it was also a happy moment because she had done so much, because characters in stories like that paved the way for kids like me. But her impact goes beyond just this television show. Her impact then goes to, she establishes, and starts working with NASA to recruit minority and female personnel to the space agency and began working at, with an affiliation called Women in Motion.

And so that program was such a success that Women in Motion, it’s what recruited Sally Ride. It is what inevitably took us to get Christa McAuliffe on a space challenger in 1986. These are the things that fundamentally shaped my view of the world. I actually got to see the space shuttle on the launchpad.

I was a visitor. My mom had worked really hard to take us to Disney that year, and it was like the coldest winter that Florida had ever had. And we go and we get to see the space shuttle right before it actually, before the Challenger disaster. So when we think about the things in a Gen X-er’s life that helped shape their view of the world, it was that even a science fiction character, Lieutenant Uhura, right, could make and put a woman into space, a teacher no less.

And that to me has been that connectivity through time, those fundamental truths that if you believe in a different path, and if you believe in the betterment of our society, that you can link it to wonderful fiction that has been out.

And I will tell you, there’s more really lousy fiction out there that is dystopian than there is Utopian. Not that utopia should be the diametrical opposite. I think that Star Trek wasn’t utopian as much as it was clear-eyed about what could be, and so much of what we are actually looking at today in AI. So one of the things I loved the most about both her character and its representation is that Gene Roddenberry started with, I think a very fundamental tenet in his writing, which was infinite diversity and infinite combinations.

For those of you who are Star Trek fans, know that IDIC, right is about taking delight in the essential differences between people and their thinking and their cultures, and inviting and valuing that and exalting, frankly, the infinite diversity in infinite combinations. That has been true. I have taken that, like completely ripped it and brought it into my career and how I apply my own leadership because remember, you cannot be what you cannot see.

I, and I’m gonna repeat that. You cannot be what you cannot see. And so if we cannot think about that when writing stories, and, and the fundamental importance of it then we’ll have missed, we’ll have missed the big picture. And that kid in Dubuque, Iowa, who might be a kid of color, right? Not just my, there are kids of color in Dubuque, Iowa.

They’re not just in New York, they’re not just in Chicago. Of that middle class kid who has ganas in Spanish. A passion, a desire and intent to do something better with their lives.

Helen Todd: I love that. I got chills, hearing you share that. And I think this is a great segue into your project Designed By Us, cuz that really embodies, raising up voices and representation in the, in the STEAM industry and your podcast too, which for all the podcast listeners, definitely have to check out Joanna’s podcast, Designed By Us, yeah, why don’t we talk about Designed By Us.
Joanna Peña-Bickley: So Designed By Us started in 2019 right before the pandemic. And it is a, it is a collective effort. Let me start with by no means is it my effort alone.

I come from a multi-generational place of designers. We believe that design manifests itself in all different kinds of ways. And that if you are in the arts and design, they’re, the importance of its intersection with technology and science is critical both to educating people but actually creating frameworks and pathways to a different new collar workforce.

So let me dive into what that means. Designed By Us is a cooperative that is on a mission to accelerate gender equity in science, technology, engineering, arts, math and design, what we call STEAMD, and cultivating tech literacy and ethical equity is at the core of our business model. It was something that I founded with my grown children who are all in the arts, some forms of the arts and technology.

I have one that is in sound design. I’ve got one that’s in theater design, and carpentry, and the technology that goes along with that. I’ve got one that is a, you know, writing stories and a playwright. I have a son that works at Amazon. Each one of them, we have a big family, came together and said, what would we do well?

How would we use our privilege, in helping invest in education and creating new on-ramps? The important part of this isn’t just taking the old pathways or mending the old pathways, but actually creating the new pathways to education in ways that maybe weren’t there for us or maybe in ways that, aren’t, aren’t traditional.

And so we really believe that we could build and create the frameworks around a pioneering a Web3 education and technology company that would accelerate that gender equity into every sector of the global economy. Remember, infinite diversity and infinite combinations utilizing action learning, right?

And in and training people through that action learning for, not the jobs of the future. Let’s be very clear, they’re the jobs of the right now, right? And we’re doing that through creating frameworks for apprentices that aim to solve for the advancement of technology and workers needed to propel business forward.

We have been at a historic low of having the right kinds of skill sets of business today. And so, so much of the work we have there is around helping companies develop apprenticeships, hybrid training, preparing people to interview preparation.

But ultimately we, in this next year will be launching a service that is about bringing learning and that accessible learning to everybody within the STEAM, the science, technology, engineering, arts, math and design frameworks and elements. So critical. I think both to the success of any business, but we actually think to the success of our society, cuz we don’t invest in women and girls and non-binary creators and builders, then we are not investing in a future, we’re investing in the past.

Helen Todd: So well-said and eloquently said. And your podcast, Designed By is really to highlight a lot of different diverse views. So if you wanna do a quick plug

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Sure.

Helen Todd:I started listening to one this morning and, and really loved it. So it’s, it’s on my list to listen to binge.
Joanna Peña-Bickley: So, let me start with DesignedBy.show, you know, is actually very much around, talking to the innovators, finding the Nichelle Nichols of the world, those, those quiet heroes behind the scenes who are creating, designing, engineering our paths forward, and helping them share their stories and helping them do things in a way that I think that realizing and elevating that everybody’s story matters.

And sometimes your story might inspire somebody else’s to take a different path, a better path, and show them what can be. Right. And so I take the time and talk, you know, talk to women all over the world about the unique things that they’re doing. And so we just put up, we have our full first season up.

We’re in the midst of production of our second season. I need to give a shout out to the team, the sound designers, that is led by Substance Studios, that was incubated in the Designed By Us Design Lab, were, they’re creating the new generation of audio and music production utilizing AI.

You know, a part of the production is actually the learning to use, you know, be a, a STEAM leader. And so everything that we do is always about learning and, and bringing people who are passionate, but maybe don’t have those skills to say. Building those skills for tomorrow. So I feel so fortunate that I get to work with a group of young people, to bring that to bear in a way that I didn’t think was actually possible.

Helen Todd: I love that. And for all the listeners and viewers, I will put links to everything that’s mentioned in the show, in the show notes, so that you can find everything that Joanna is talking about.

And I think one thing, that a question that popped into my mind as you were talking, especially about learning and also I, the show we’re, we’re learning a lot about AI and using it in the production as well. And kind of as we get more into it, we’ll be sharing our learnings cuz we’re definitely embracing it to find efficiencies.

But one thing that you mentioned about learning, I’m curious, you know, for parents out there who have kids, you know, maybe a newborn all the way up through high school.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Mmm-hmmm

Helen Todd: And thinking about, you know, trade schools or college, and this tech is just moving so fast with jobs and careers that maybe that we can’t even fathom yet. Like what advice would you give to parents who are thinking about what should I, how can I help my kids embrace this new future that we’re all entering?

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Hmm. So I think we are actually, we are in the assistive computing era. It’s here, we, it’s not coming, it’s here. And I think

Helen Todd: Sorry. Oh, let me interrupt you for, for those who don’t know the term assistive computing, can you actually share what that means? Cuz I just learned it at South by Southwest, so

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Got it. Assistive. So we hear a lot about artificial intelligence, and assistive computing is the, the usage of artificial intelligence to actually compute things, whether that be through voice, through touch, through speech, through chat, right? Text to, that is at its core what assistive computing is.

And if you have an Alexa speaker in your home, that’s an assistive computer, right? So, you probably heard a lot about like ChatGPT, and one of the things that drives me a little bit nuts right now is that we have really smart leaders making really unwise decisions and those unwise decisions are around banning what ultimately will be the calculator of our time.

The fact that we are looking at artificial intelligence in a way that is so dystopian is quite remarkable to me. For me, I encourage my children to utilize these tools. They will be, they are the tools that will help them advance in their careers, help them advance socioeconomically, like, let us not turn off the tools and create an intelligence divide the way that we have created a digital divide amongst our rural communities that don’t have connectivity.

And so one of the things I think is really important for leaders, parents, folks out there is to understand that artificial intelligence is a natural evolution. It didn’t just show up. It hasn’t just learned. It’s been something that has been around for a while. You know, I had the luxury of working at IBM at the time, the early days of Watson, and then taking that to the next step of, you know, the consumerization of that through, working with Amazon Alexa.

And so here’s what I’ll tell you. The intention behind assistive computing is actually to help you with your everyday tasks. I mean, we as human beings have some really tough problems to solve, and there’s far too much data in the ether for us to be worried about what email is next. And if there’s an assistive technology that could help you clear your plate to focus on what matters, being with your family, focus on the things that matter most, you know, climate to focus on, you know, social justice aspects, that’s important.

Those things are important. And so I equate where we are today, right? Today it feels like when introduced into society, it’s indistinguishable from magic. But what we’re seeing from an adoption standpoint, right, artificial intelligence or assistive computing, the adoption of it has come, feels like it’s overnight.

It hasn’t been necessarily overnight. ChaptGPT is an overnight success because they have made, they have designed it in a way that is utilizing natural language. All you have to do is type in, right, Help me with X. But there is a skill in prompt writing. And you know, prompt writing means you have to have foundational knowledge to make the AI work for you.

So it’s not here to replace you, it’s here to augment you, and it’s here to augment you in a way that enables you to get further and do more things with your time rather than less. And so, if I looked at it today, I will say that in five years that we will look at ChatGPT and tools like this, like we do the calculator.

And I don’t know about you. I remember when I was in high school, and any assistive technology, like a calculator was like banned. And you were doing that. Well, guess what? It didn’t not teach you mathematical theory, like by banning that, you know, it’s like by learning your times tables should not be the measure of somebody’s intelligence.

And if there’s an assisted technology that enables you to apply that mathematic theory in everyday scenarios, you would do it right. And we did do it. Tell me a classroom that doesn’t, that actually still bans calculators. If, if so, I, I’d really had like to have a conversation with that teacher, or that’s even banning spreadsheets or a business that bans spreadsheets.

That is where we are. It is a transformational technology that right now is indistinguishable from magic cuz it is so well designed and if used properly, will stand to fundamentally transform the way that we work and, and do things in the world. And so that’s what’s exciting to me.

But I think we’re at this interesting inflection point where we as leaders of big businesses, as school districts are talking about do not ban AI, teach it, teach the skills that you need to use it so that we can have forward progress.

Helen Todd: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. And since this is a podcast on creativity, I know you’ve said something kind of similar for the creators out there of like, don’t be scared about it. It will free you up. So I don’t know if you’d like to expand on that for, for all those who are kind of have a little bit of fear right now around this technology.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: So we fear what we don’t know as human beings and my encouragement to the creators out there is we have so much accessibility to these things right now. Go play with ChatGPT, go tinker with it. It’s transformational. It will change the way that you work. I play with everything from slides.ai to Midjourney, to proprietary tools that utilize AI in my own design work.

And it has freed me. It’s actually made me a better designer. Right. It’s actually not replacing me as a designer because you still need, in order for me to put all the parameters in to re create the right prompt or the right input into the systems for it to give you an output of infinite number of concepts, you need your foundational knowledge.

Right. You, you need to actually know that, you know, the parameters by this need to be like 16 by nine and, and color theory and, the art history, that it’s, all of these things don’t go away. They are required to make really great things.

And so in order for you to get over your fear, you’ve actually got to face it and try the tools and inevitably begin to once you try it, and I will find they’re so much easier to use than they used to be. I mean, I used to actually have to write code to, to engage with my AI. I don’t have to write code anymore to do that because there’s so many text-to interfaces enabled. Sometimes when I’m doing really hard, hard production work in like industrial design, I’m still writing a few lines of code to get to the precision that I need in a concept or the constraint, in a mechanical working version of my prototypes.

But ultimately they are about augmenting our intelligence. And what does that do? If I don’t have to spend a month creating infinite possibilities, but I can curate from the possibilities that my parameters created, that’s a much better and more cohesive job for me to do and bring into the design process, shortening the time to market, shortening my time to bring somebody a new idea.

Um, and doing so in a way that, you know, because I understand the inputs of the system, right? Yo better have an understanding of the outputs, but you’re in the outputs are only as good as the inputs. And that’s true of any intelligent form.

But we’re in a really, I think, precipitous place where you wanna make sure that the leaders, that our creators are getting their hands dirty and taking command of these tools. Because if you don’t, the thing that will replace you will be somebody who does work with AI. The AI will not replace you, but somebody who works with AI will totally replace you.

Helen Todd: Well, and one thing that I really appreciate and respect about you since you’ve been in the space so long, you actually kind of came up with your own ethical framework as guardrails to inform your work.

And I think that’s something really important to keep in mind as we’re all figuring out, you know, how these tools, how we want these tools to help shape society for the betterment. And I’d love to kind of hear, you know, when you develop them, kind of the inception and how you’ve been tweaking them and some of the core pillars of them.

Just because I think that ethical framework, cuz you mentioned unwise, that some of these leaders are making unwise decisions and that we really do need to be thinking about these.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: They’re uninformed, you know, they’re, what, what I find them, they are both uninformed and ultimately they’ll hold their businesses back.

They will, they will pay the price to someone who uses it better. So, that being said, so cognitive, you asked me earlier in the podcast right around the name Cognitive Experience Design. Cognitive Experience Design, right, is it both takes the power of cognitive psychology, right, and how we take in information from systems. But it also, right, is a foundation for the cognitive computing that is the foundation to artificial intelligence.

And so I established a foundation that was really about bringing the fundamental truths that serve as a foundational system of a chain of reasoning. When we think about working with computers or actually building those data sets that, I mean, think about it.
You know, we started with all this data, those data turned into data models. Now we can use a chat interface to ask those data models questioning, where it’s reasoning, right? And it’s the machine understands and helps you reason. And so around those principles, it was always with the core of how do we bring this to the world?

Some universal tenets, some, some really powerful things that inform your decisions around what you’re creating. And I think that’s what principles are meant to do. They are meant to introduce tension in a way that help inform your decision-making in a way that’s both autonomous, that doesn’t feel tops down, but ultimately is there to help guide the thousand decisions that go into designing a product or a service or even an experience.

And so one of the core tenets is human effects. So, and it’s about human obsessed cognitive experience design that strives to enhance human ability, not replace or cause harm. And so ensuring that human agency, we know human agency is about, that’s paramount, but you’ve gotta balance that between the people and the algorithms in a manner that equitably complements human skills and weaknesses, right in order to promote human control and skillful action.

And so if I look at these, there’s you know, they, what started out as five as use cases have, I have pledged to continue evolving these and sharing these out. So you can go to cognitiveexperience.design and all you have to do is click on about, and you’ll see principles and it’s, like we’re, you know, the principle of human effects, the principles of transparent truth and breaking bias and pledging privacy and systematic sanctuary, in creating algorithmic accord with society, utilizing empathetic analytics, being inclusive, right? Those data sets aren’t always inclusive of all people.

And so we have to respectfully and with dignity, never just virtue signal to its inclusivity, but actually include everyone and as many as people as we can in those data sets so that we are, not promoting empty promises, right? But we are designing for infinite diversity in infinite combinations, and then pledging to be radically simple.

Radically simple. When you introduce complexity into a design, you are disenfranchising people. You don’t realize it. No amount of user testing will ever show the impact of how many people were not using your service, right? They only focus on the people that are using the service. So you wanna understand that often your complexity does create complexity in people’s lives.

And then ultimately, creating a higher order of wise works because healthy design, right, accelerates new ideas, and they’re there and they have to strive to work for everyone, everywhere, every day. And those are hard things to live by and often says, well, you know, those feel like they’re too hard to use in, in every, in everyday scenario.

And the reality is, is that, they are, they should be used as the constraints and mechanism to inform your decisions. And good design is hard and will remain hard in the age of assistive. and so why make it even harder, without a set of principles and guidelines to help us create. But I also, I think it’s important that I’m not the only one in the space who has created guidelines.
I try to read through and look at all the rest of the guidelines that are put out by Apple, that are put out by Microsoft, that are put out by Google and Amazon right around these, because there are lots of people thinking in this space right now.

Helen Todd: Yep. That, that’s great. And there was one question that I had about one of them.

The night before I launched this podcast, I was actually listening to a Tristan Harris presentation. It was a very dystopian one, and it was very sobering the night before I launched, you know, a podcast embracing AI. But one thing that he, and I think, his co-presenter, Aza, I forget his last name, had mentioned that social media today has kind of been the race for those fundamental, primal emotions of fear.

And that AI, the new race is to intimacy. And I know in the space everyone kind of equates or references the movie Her to ChatGPT of where you have that very, you know, almost feels like you’re talking to a human. And then, you know, the Hard Fork podcast episode where Kevin Roose had that interesting experience with, with Sydney, who was like, the AI was saying, you don’t love your wife because I love you, all of these things, but it kind of brings up this intimacy and in your algorithm.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: So the AI was having a hallucination.

Helen Todd: Yeah, algorithmic accord you mentioned to not create unhealthy emotional dependencies.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Mm-hmm.

Helen Todd: And just in light with how intimate these tools already kind of feel, and we’re kind of the intimacy of the large language model chatbots, like how, how do you think about making health ,relationships between tech and human, especially, you know, in the seat that you sit and the height of the place that you sit in the industry?

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Thanks. I think that’s a very good question. You know, it’s intentional and it comes every day. And let me start with, the majority of the conversation is dystopian, and it is really sad because that in and of itself is creating fear. Fear of the unknown. The majority of people on the planet have not experienced an AI yet, and so it is painting artificial intelligence as a dystopian tool for mass brain control.

And that there might be somebody, a bad actor out there. I’ll leave all names out there. And intent, just like there is bad intent everywhere in the world, but there’s also good intent. And so when I talk about algorithmic accord, right, that create enduring and healthy relationships and unhealthy emotional dependencies, let’s take a step back and talk about our unhealthy emotional dependencies for likes and clicks.

It’s like that, right? It’s understanding that, you know, when we, when social media, and I think it’s really important to say that ethical, it’s not to say that anybody went in with that was the intention, but because there were not enough intentions in those spaces and understanding of humanity that we didn’t put in the mechanisms for, you know, you created a town square, but you created it without law enforcement.

You created it without boundaries, thinking that you were smarter than a society that had already replicated these things. And so I think it’s so important that creators do their homework, who has been in this space before, understand what they have learned, and then take what they have learned and try to apply it forward.

And so for me, the tenet and principle of algorithmic accord is about the authenticity combined with the transparency and intention. You know, if you look one of the tenets, I’m sorry, one of the principles is transparent truth. Trustworthy cognitive experience design plainly explains how the system and invention or the product or services comes to a conclusion, decision, projection. prediction with things like data analyst progress indicators, corpus sourcing, confident scores, right? How confident is that score at a moment of hallucination that the system tells you it’s in a moment of hallucination, right? Because it recognizes that in itself.

It is no different, you know, if AI is to work like humans, it is no different, you would want your AI right to recognize its weakness, just as we hope that great leaders recognize their weaknesses and share those vulnerabilities. And you can do so in explanatory interfaces.

Helen Todd: In terms of there’s been a lot of talk about the industry slowing down, the release to the public of these tools.
You, you, for those who didn’t say, you shook your head, No, you disagree.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: It’s right up there with the banning piece of this. So let me start with, I think that we, so lemme start with, you know, releasing them to the public. I think what you release to the public is, I, here’s what’s really sad about the conversation we’re having because we’re all in a state of cognitive overload and we don’t understand the, the technology, the transformers like that, that brought us, you know, it’s like we don’t get these things with a lot of little decisions that got us here.

And I think that we’re having a binary conversation. Of course, we should be more intentional in our process of releasing these to the public. Of understanding the data sets that are being trained in these systems and being truthful where those data sets come from, who they include and who they don’t include.

Now, some might argue that is proprietary information and that’s how I’m building my business, but if you’re going to build trust of a tool, your users deserve to know where those, the data sets are. Your users deserve to know whether or not their communities and their community’s data is sitting in those data sets, to come up with conclusions, decisions, projections, predictions.

So when I talk about, you know, experience design that plainly explains how the system works, that’s what I’m talking about, which is you can do that through what they call corpus sourcing. Tell us where the information’s coming from. What did you train on?
I believe in human intervention in that training, you know? Yes. When you allow a machine to go out and do its own thing, it’s kind of like letting a kid go out and do its own. Would you let a five-year-old go out into the world and do its own thing? No. So this is about actually bringing common sense to the conversation.

And so should you slow down the growth and learning of a five-year-old? No, but you should intervene and have human intervention in these, and we wanna make sure that the humans that are represented in that intervention come in infinite diversity and infinite combinations. And so the thing that I plead with the creators of ChatGPT of, you know, some of the projects that I’ve worked on is just be truthful about who is working on these things so that you do so in a way that says maybe doesn’t reveal their personal information. Let’s be very clear. We need to protect people as well. That offers privacy. That is pledged, which is the fourth tenet, right, of experience design that builds communications process that protect and handle the data of those stakeholders, that interact with the system directly or indirectly.

But ladies out there, creators, I am personally funding stories about positive outcomes because if we only have dystopian outcomes, we won’t get to the positive outcomes. And let me tell you, we are solving, we are getting closer and closer to figuring out how do we treat cancer? How do we treat Alzheimer’s?

How do we think about real human conditions where AI is actually improving people’s lives. And that to me is ultimately what stands in the, if we continue to tell dystopian stories, we will not get to the solves for the important things around climate, our health, our society.

Helen Todd: I think it’s great and it’s just asking your fundamental question of what if and what if, you know what’s possible.
And even something you said earlier of what you cannot see, you cannot be. And we, and this is actually one of the missions of this podcast, is to, you know, have clear-eyed about some of the conversations and guardrails, but also to use our collective imagination to like co-create this world that we wanna live in. And how this tech does help for the betterment of society.

And Yeah. And I guess to that end, you’ve mentioned a lot about infinite combinations, infinite diversity. Is there any, I guess, dream or wish for this technology that you want to achieve or see in your lifetime happen with these tools in the looking to the more utopian side of things?

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Well, I’m gonna go, I struggle with Utopia because I don’t know if it exists. It might, but I’m not sure if it exists. So the answer to that is, yes, I do. and that is why I couldn’t be more excited about the work I’m doing with Sensory6, right. We are living in a time of incredible change, not just big technology.

The climate has changed. It isn’t changing, it has changed. We are also living in a time where we just survived a pandemic, and I want us to take a moment to realize that human life, if the pandemic taught us nothing more, it wasn’t about whether we should go back to work and or not go back to an office, but it should have told us that we actually have to work on the resiliency, right, of our planet and of the people that inhabit this little planet.

We’re such a little planet that we have to take care of. And so the work that I am doing today with Sensory6, which is a new company who’s on a mission to accelerate human machine integration in order to enhance our resilience in a wilding world.

And so I am in the midst of bringing together design scientists who are pioneering the frontiers of bio wearable technology and human digital twins to augment our intelligence and do so in everyday ways to give us the superpowers to adapt to a wilding world. And we live in a wilding world, not just from the climate perspective, but the wilding of technological, advanced societal advance, all of these things are changing.

And so how do we help humans exist at a better and higher level? And that’s what Sensory6 is all about, right? Is creating the platforms, the experiences, the business tools to enhance human sensory, the human sensory experience, and augment humanity rather than replace it.

Helen Todd: Yeah. That’s amazing. And I’m so excited to be at the infancy in hearing about Sensory6 cuz it’s officially according to the website, launching later this year, like early December. Is that right?

Joanna Peña-Bickley: That’s right. And we’re here to, you know, we’re here to empower people to have daily resilience, right?
And we can do that through bio wearables through the technologies that we have. And ultimately giving people the power of bringing the understanding of their resilience in the form of digital twins. And how does that help us? Right? It’s like, whoa, a digital twin. For those listeners who don’t know what that is, it is actually speaking of the Matrix, is a digital manifestation of something physical.

And so in manufacturing we use them in product design. We utilize digital twins, you know, in 3D representations of things as live representations. Why haven’t we applied that science and in the consumerization of that for us? And we wanna do so in a way that protects our privacy in a way that elevates humans to take hold of their health and their wellness in a holistic way and democratizes that health and wellness, to just about any device so that you can walk in and facilitate that knowledge of you to get to an individualized, aging process throughout your life, not just, you know, at these little spurts in time, the way we treat healthcare today.

So somebody asked me, is this a healthcare product? And I said, no, that’s not really, it is at the intersection of biotechnology, right. But in the consumerization of that, which is about bringing knowledge and adaptation to a world that enables us to just take on new behaviors and to learn to be in this space in a new and unique ways.

You know, if somebody had asked me back when I got to work on the Citibank application, on the first iteration of the Apple Watch, if I had, would be standing all the time, or if I would be so conscious of my health and wellness, I have to give my, like, give hats off to the folks at Apple because they had the intentionality to say that we can be a healthier society and we can do it, you know, the superpower of a wearable.

I actually think that we can take it a step further, and we can create, individualized bioware for people, that reaches them every day, everywhere, and do it for everyone.

Helen Todd: That’s amazing. and is there anything else you wanna say about Sensory6?

Joanna Peña-Bickley: You know, I think some of the what ifs that we’re exploring is, you know, what, if you can enhance the way people hear, what if you could enhance the way people see? What if you could enhance the way that we modulate our temperature?
I will tell you as a woman who is early into a menopause journey, ladies, you’re gonna want temperature modulating clothing. It happens. And I wanna know why no one has thought about this before. I think sometimes it’s because we have not had infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

But these are the, some of the what ifs in the spaces that Sensory6 is actually doing. Ladies, I’m working on the menopause thing. There’s an answer. We all go through it. Hot flashes can be cold. I didn’t know that. But there too, there is a technology that will help us with it. And so those are the kinds of explorations we’re doing at Sensory6.

As I think about the future, I think about the future in a couple different ways. One is about tomorrow, one is the midterm, and one is the longer term. Right? And a lot of about the thinking, I think about the long term is so much to do with what is the world that I wanna live in or leave behind for my children and my grandchildren.

I don’t have grandchildren yet. Kids, get to it.

Helen Todd: No pressure, no pressure.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: No pressure. Right? No pressure. I try not to put pressure on them. But by this point, I had already given my mother, all of the grandkids she was gonna get outta me. We just went like, geez, again, no pressure, kids. They like to remind me, you were an overachiever.

I said, in so many different ways, darling, you have no idea.

Helen Todd: I love it.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Some people might look at having children early as like a, Ooh, she was a teenage mom. Mm, no. Overachieving. You just have to, the lens by which you look through it.

Helen Todd: So true in so many aspects of life. Totally.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: So, but I, generally, you know, want to leap behind a world that is better.

Why wouldn’t we all want that? You know, I do believe in community, those spaces. I don’t know what’s next. I don’t predict the future. What I do do is actually dare to design it today. And that’s the intention I hope to leave behind. And the inspiration that I hope that we all have it within our power to design a better future and we can do it starting today.

And so the future isn’t for me, some far off concept. The future is about dreaming of what a better tomorrow can be and working really hard, and diligently bringing people together around the table to intentionally bring change into the world in little bits at a time.

Helen Todd: I love that. And such a beautiful invitation to all the listeners and viewers in an invitation to dare to dream, to design, to co-create this future that we wanna live in.

So I invite everyone to marinate on that and how it applies to their lives. And speaking of, you know, people doing interesting things, I’m so excited to have you on the podcast, who are some people who are inspiring you and also doing interesting things in this space? I’m always curious of who’s inspiring the people that I’m inspired by.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Ah, I have to tell you, you know what, so the late great Zaha Hadid was an inspiration to me. Let me, I’ll start with my mom is an inspiration to me. I think, you know, just the fact that, there isn’t any aspect of her life that wasn’t unconventional, although, you know, I don’t think she thinks about it that way, I certainly do.

You know, she wouldn’t say that she was a woman’s leader, but she certainly was carving out path for women in construction. You know, before there was a show called Designing Women, my mom ran that company in San Antonio, Texas, baby, she was out. She didn’t need a show. She was the show.

So, that being said, you know, so much of it has actually come from my personal life. My children are big inspirations to me because they’re at this space where they’re learning, you know, they’re at the early journey of their careers. And so when I walk into spaces, or I manage teams that I, you know, frankly I have children their age, I take it with a great sense of responsibility as a leader to come into those spaces with intention, to, to help them dream, help them wonder, because I get that dream and wonder from there.

There’s a couple of folks I think, in my life and in spaces. So I talked about Zaha Hadid. Please go check out Zaha Hadid. She passed away in 2016, like way too early. But she was one of the women in architecture that was utilizing artificial intelligence to do generative design of her own designs.

And she is like the queen of sci-fi. When you look at her architecture, it is something out of Star Trek. It’s something out of an Arthur C. Clark film that you would put into maybe like Rendezvous with Rama.

For the listeners who want a good book to play around with, Rendezvous with Rama is an Arthur C. Clark story, that tells of a probe. I quite literally some of the work that she looks like, you know, it’s like she made, she was making homes and buildings for like, the James Bonds of sci-fi. I wish that they were doing more North American work. But if you go to Europe, there’s a lot of really interesting things going there.

The other person in my life that I had such a great inspiration I’m gonna tell you is a dear friend of mine. I hope when she hears this or if she hears this, that she blushes a little bit. Her name is Dava Newman.

She is the current, first of all, she is an amazing human being. I cannot stand when we introduce women by their titles because women are so much more than a title. This woman is a queen in so many ways, but she is such an inspiration. She leads the Media Lab at MIT, and is somebody who has always been on a pursuit of constant learning.

The time I get to spend with Dava and my and the team at Earth DNA, which I’m on the board of with Gee [unclear] is like that time of gets to bring out my inner kid, because this is a woman who was the deputy administrator in the Obama administration at NASA. She, you know, it was like without Nichelle Nichols, there’s no Dava Newman.

And so, you know, to be in Dava’s, like orbit, is always one of the things where you wanna learn and makes me believe there is a better future. And so, so much of the work that she’s fueling as both a professor, right, let’s honor our educators and honor the people in institutions that are bringing new ways of educating people to bear, because ultimately, they are the ones who are facilitating the change that we need in the world.

And so she’s doing a lot of work, and so I hope to see her very soon in the summer, so that we can get together and start cooking up what Sensory6 will do and can do. You know, I, the list goes on and on, but if I started very simply, mom, kids, husband are inspirations every day.

Zaha Hadid, go and check out her work. Go look at what her firm’s doing. They are at the cutting edge of applying artificial intelligence to good. And then Dava Newman, who is really taking us into that blurring the lines between science, technology, engineering, arts and math and design in real time and doing it with students every single day.

So those are the people that, you know, when I think about like, who do I go and like my brain trust, although I didn’t get to know Zaha, if I had gotten to know her, I would have just studied at her feet and just wanted to soak up the knowledge and the creativity and wait the chutzpah it takes for a woman in the construction field in architecture to build sustainable, creative, future-forward, the society that we want to live in, those utopian buildings that we wanna live in.

Helen Todd: Well, I know you just put me down a rabbit hole, after this interview, and I’m sure a lot of listeners to look up all of these amazing people that you listed. And again, I’ll put everything in the show notes too so that you can find more about Joanna’s work and links to everyone.

I think we covered predictions and hopes for the near future. So everyone, you know, dare to dream and design for the future that you want. Joanna, it has been such a pleasure. I have so enjoyed this conversation, and thank you so much for your time and just sharing you and some of your mind and perspective and thoughts with us here today.

So thank you.

Joanna Peña-Bickley: Helen. Thank you. And listeners, thank you for taking the moment to listen.

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