People, places, technology, and such

I read today a short article (more like a column) in the October issue of Wired, that goes in the same direction that I was trying to describe in my previous post (although I have to admit that Mathew Honan’s style is more concise and humorous that mine…)

The fact is that in business, as in real life, it seems that we are in desperate need for that big idea that is going to save us all our problems .

I know that today’s is a fast evolving world and  it is very difficult to be aware of all the changes and trends, and it is even more difficult to put aside some quality time to reflect and get some understanding on what do they mean and are the forces behind them.

Ido not expect terribly deep analysis; no need to be a Plato, or a Kant, not even a MacLuhan, no need to write a thesis dissertation to justify any decision or action; but I really would like that people (and specially some of the people that I interact and work with…) took some time to look beyond the prefab and canned big idea of the month.

At the end, those ideas are just like balloons: the bigger and better they look, the more hollow they are…

Using color is a typical way to differentiate between slightly different usages of otherwise similar artifacts. Be it garbage recycling containers in Barcelona…

… or mailboxes in Bangalore…

As widespread as it is the use of color coding, it remains quite a local thing in many occasions. The meaning and associations attributed to different colors varies a lot in different cultures and societies, so color codes are constantly being invented to be used in specific situations and locations. Some of them may evolve to be fully global, maybe trough a formal standardization process, but in lot of cases they remain local, or are reinterpreted (translated) when moved to different situations and cultural environments….

A small test: what different type of garbage do you think you should throw in each container?, what type of letters would you put in each mailbox? (try to answer the question without reading the small print in the photographs…)

You start to feel old when some your generation icons become revival decoration items…Remember when space invders was the latest thing in arcade games?; well, after a few(?) years it is back as trendy street art.

Found by my 6 years old son in a pedestrian street in Covent Garden, London (and the day was my 42nd birthday, so maybe that’s why I was feeling old…)

So, here I am, starting my second adventure in the blogosphere…

Some visitors may already know about Ven y Dime Cómo Vives, the blog (in Spanish) where my wife and I write about the experiences of an expat family in Bangalore. After a few months of posting, I guess I’m hooked on the idea of writing for some (mostly unknown) audience, and I have decided to try a different experiment. My purpose is to write about stuff more related to my work and my professional, and academic, interests.

I suppose that means that I need to explain which are those interests: I have been involved in technology development and innovation for more than 15 years, mostly in the software area, directly working for, or indirectly interacting with, some of the leading technology MNCs. If I had to summarize my learnings during these years in one phrase it would be: technology itself is only a 10% of the total equation. There are lots of other factors: economic, social and cultural that play a key role in the development, success and adoption of new technologies and innovations.

That’s how I got more and more interested on the interactions between innovation, technology and society and I started a PhD in STS (Society and Technology Studies). Sadly, the PhD work has been parked for the last year and a half, first due to some family changes that kept me quite busy, and then because I decided to take an assignment to work in Bangalore, India in setting up a new development group.

The experience has been great, both from a personal, experiencing a very different culture and way of life, and professional perspective, learning how to deal with knowledge transfer, remote research and development models, and building capabilities in a brand new team. Actually, lots of the concepts and ideas that I learned from my PhD courses have been quite useful for this assignment.

So I have decided to blog about some of these topics: innovation, technology, society, globalization, culture, and their interactions.

Whenever you venture into a new project there is some anxiety about what is going to happen and how it is going to evolve, but I think that I’m going to enjoy this one, at least as much as I enjoy my other life in the blogosphere… Lets see what happens!

A final note: Pardon our Appearance!. I have just started the blog and have not had much time to customize the template. I expect to have some time in the next few weeks to give it a more atractive, and personalized, look