It has now been almost two years since I made the jump from Redmond to Singapore, it has been a fun and educational journey. Early on it was evident that the use cases for technology here in the region had the potential to vary dramatically from what I had been used to in the United States and England before that.
Beyond just the technology I have learned a great deal about the different views and values that people here in the region carry. It has been fascinating and often very humbling to learn about different superstitions, belief systems and values that people around here live by.
With all that in mind I thought it would be worthwhile highlighting a recent story in the Bangkok Post that discusses some work taking place in Thailand that brings many of these dynamics together, starting to look at the relevance and role of technology in this very different part of the world.
The story is about a working group that Professor Craig Warren Smith of the University of Washington wants to form in Thailand to look at spiritual applications and user interfaces for technology that we all use today;
He believes that global innovation around the human computer interface based on Asian spiritual traditions can begin in Thailand and that the relationship between open source, open technology and Thailand’s open society should be a key enabler of this.
With its rich Buddhist culture and IT design skills, Thailand could bring together spiritual traditions from Thai and other Asian countries “to help build an ecosystem for meaningful technologies,” said Prof Smith, who has also been a Buddhist instructor for 25 years.
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“I’m hoping that some kind of network could come together here to reach out to the global headquarters of multinational companies and offer them an opportunity to beta test their best thinking on this,” he said.
“We need to be able to put Thailand on the map as a fundamental place for innovation in technology design,” he said, noting that Thailand already had a track record by helping to pioneer new pricing models for Microsoft Windows and Office with the Windows Starter Edition.
It is worth following the link to the Bangkok Post story and reading the whole article, it will equally interesting to see where this work goes.
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