Sophie Kleber
Emotional interface Ethicist
Head of Spaces UX, Google
New York City, USA
Sophie shapes workspaces that marry intelligence and soul.
How do human emotions work? What's the danger of silicone sycophants manipulating our feelings? And how do we go beyond shallow glamour and into the art of creating spaces for the human soul? These are the types of questions that Sophie thinks about everyday.
Born into a family of costume designers, conductors, and writers in Berlin, Sophie’s life has been infused with art, resilience, and responsibility since the start. Her caring and creative approach serves her well as she works to infuse emotion and ethics into innovative user interfaces.
An experience designer by trade, Sophie has followed the emotional development of automated assistants and artificial intelligences, and applied the findings to her work with voice UIs and sentient computing. A former Global Executive Creative Director at the experience agency Huge, she has looked into the future of human-computer interaction and found that when computers have personalities, humans want to be their friends.
Today, Sophie brings her empathetic approach to designing future work environments with the help of these friendships: in the form of user insights, people analytics, ambient computing, and spatial technology.