sábado, 26 de maio de 2012

Interesting times

Yesterday evening, while chatting with a colleague over dinner, he mentioned this sentence by someone, whose name I cannot recall now: may you live in interesting times

Definitely, we live in interesting times. We cannot have a logical, and meaningful, grasp of the future. Of course, we can look at the past and try to foresee the future, but, though the future will for sure repeat something that already happened in the past, we have no idea about what it will be. These times are interesting and risky. 

During the DESRIST conference, there were discussions about innovation and design, and it occurred to me that there is some kind of paradox between design and innovation. For instance, when we design the software architecture for a system, first, we try to build a common understanding among all stakeholders on what is the problem and what are the requirements for the solution. Then, the architect designs an "elegant" solution that fulfills the stakeholders needs and, hopefully, he expects to come out with something that contains some innovation. However, if the result is innovative most of the stakeholders would have disagreed beforehand with it. When there is innovation, consensus is a result of innovation and not its source.

Life is not by design and we live in interesting times.

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