Zoe So
She/Her
Product Manager
Aquatonomy
Zoe So is a product manager and service designer at Aquatonomy, an autonomous underwater robotics company based in Pittsburgh, where she leads end-to-end service design for human-robot collaboration in hazardous environments. Her work spans UX strategy, field research, and service design for systems that operate where humans can't easily go: underwater, in zero visibility, and under pressure.
Her broader design practice spans health and technology: she has designed enterprise data platforms for healthcare credentialing, postpartum health monitoring systems using wearables and environmental sensors, and services for public hospital systems across California. Across contexts, her work sits at the intersection of complex systems, high stakes, and the humans navigating both.
Zoe holds a Master of Arts in Design and a Master of Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Public Health from UC Berkeley.
Talk
Who’s driving the yellow submarine? Safety-critical human-robot collaboration as a service design problem
What happens when you introduce autonomous underwater robots into life-or-death search and rescue missions? This talk explores how service design (not just engineering) defines the boundary between human and machine decision-making, and how we design for trust, risk, and responsibility in safety-critical systems.