Waymo's head of design explains the challenges of creating an autonomous robot 'driver'
- YooJung Ahn is Waymo's head of design.
- She oversees the design of the Waymo "driver," a complicated merger of hardware, software, and user experiences.
- She also helped designed the famous Firefly vehicle - the first clean-sheet, self-driving Google Car, unveiled in 2014.
- Ahn now works on Waymo's vehicles that are supplied by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Jaguar Land Rover.
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Editor's note: Business Insider has been talking with Waymo employees from different parts of the company to learn more about their work. What we discovered were some of the coolest jobs at Alphabet, Waymo's parent company. This is the fourth profile in the series. To read the others, click here. For a brief history of Waymo, head over here.
One of the more difficult aspects of Waymo's autonomous-mobility service is the concept of a "driver."
Visions of an android cabbie leap to mind: Mr. Data behind the wheel, asking, "Where to, sir?"
Of course, Waymo's objective is to develop integrated hardware and software systems that can eliminate the need for human-like interaction with the automobile. No steering wheel or pedals needed. The car drives itself.
But because Waymo isn't building its own vehicles, instead obtaining them from partners such as Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Jaguar Land Rover, the Alphabet-owned company wants to be able to install its tech on everything from minivans to semi trucks.
That's where the Waymo driver comes in. And that's what occupies most of YooJung Ahn's time as Waymo head of design.
"YJ" for short, she's a native of South Korea who joined Waymo in 2012, when it was still known as the Google Car project. She helped create Firefly, the adorable podmobile that Waymo used to test its technology before moving on to larger platforms and a commercial rollout in Arizona in late 2018 with the Waymo One ride-hailing service.
Defining the Waymo driver
"What is the Waymo driver?" she said in an interview with Business Insider. "That's a question I ask myself a lot."
Ahn has to because her job is all about devising how the driver should function, from sensors to the experience that users have when they climb into a Waymo-branded vehicle.
Designers are trained to think outside of boxes, to press for innovations, and to avoid business-as-usual. "Design thinking" strives to tackle problems from a variety of different angles and accept that the light-bulb moments could send the process in unexpected directions.
When designing the Waymo driver, Ahn discovered that not thinking about drivers was the best route to follow.
"With Firefly, we were designing for passengers and pedestrians, not the driver," she said.
This was the opposite of how mobility tied to cars had been done for a century.
"All the cars in the world are designed for drivers," she said, adding that it was "quite interesting" and "really funny moment," when Waymo decided to go in a different direction.
Ahn is awfully cheerful and upbeat for someone who's days are spent considering the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. The sheer weight of the conceptual problem - When is a robot not a single thing, but an a suite of interlocking systems? - could make your head hurt.
But Ahn is quick to laugh about being a designer who, for lack of a better term, is really out there.
"A lot of times, designers are perceived as creating beautiful forms," she said.
"They don't need to deal so much with technology. But when you think about designers in technology, they need to deal with all sorts of problems. Of course you need to make [the solutions] beautiful, and of course you need to make them understandable. But you need to make them work better!"
Been there, done that in industrial design before Waymo
Ahn has, to a certain extent, been there and done that with industrial design. She has design degrees from Hongik University in South Korea, including a masters. After five years at LG, she moved to Chicago for a second masters at the Illinois Institute of Technology, then worked at Motorola for seven years on a variety of products. The development of iconic products, such as the RAZR phone, kept her in the US, but after a while she yearned for a new challenge.
When she heard from Google X - the company's skunkworks - she jumped at the chance to bring her talents to the brave new world of self-driving cars. She started out by retrofitting the Toyota Priuses and Lexus SUVs that the what was then codenamed "Chauffeur" was using, but later she helped designed the Firefly vehicle from scratch.
Ahn describes her life now at Waymo as "incredibly simple." Her two cats wake her up every morning at around 7 a.m., and she's at the Googleplex in Mountain View by 8:30, where she eats breakfast at one of the campus' cafés. From then on, it's back-to-back meetings until 5-6 p.m., then perhaps some dinner picked up at the office before heading back home to labor a bit longer.
"On the weekend, I try not to work," she said. "But I don't mind working."
Nowadays, she and her team have been concentrating on designing the interactive experience that Waymo's customers might have at different points in a journey; she calls this "layers of users." But this stage of the process also entails some deep thinking.
"It's important to understand all the different users," she said.
For example, she has to consider not just passengers in Waymo vehicles, but also drivers who could encounter a Waymo vehicle on the road.
"We have to give them the feeling that this car is operating safely - that it's not going to mess them up," she said. "We can't ask them to do anything differently."
In other words, for Ahn the approach to being a Waymo designer has almost never stopped changing.
"You have to drop your ego as a designer," she said. "The best choice six months ago .... Is that still the best choice?"
In the end, Ahn definitely seems to love her job, but she's certainly under no illusions about what it entails.
"There are so many layers of complexity," she said. "When i jumped into this industry, I didn't know it was going to be this hard!"
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