The future is here, it is global, it is multiple.

Yesterday's post on women and poverty comes with many caveats, nuances. I try to touch on a couple of those caveats today.

Ten years ago, when I took Cultures of Asia, Dr. Reddy emphasized that we needed to re-think our image of "Asia." She discussed how there are MANY different cultures of Asia, and we couldn't hope to cover them all in a single semester, even in graduate-level coursework.

One of the first days, we saw a slideshow or video of parts of Asia, the cities as well as the countryside. The images emphasized modernity, the ways that Asian cities are similar to places like New York or San Francisco.

Here's a photo from our trip to South Korea, with Starbucks in the background.

Global Design

A few years after earning my M.A., I ended up leaving Houston to move to Alabama.

In the process, somebody asked me why my M.A. wasn't an M.B.A.. So, after I moved here, I set out in search of a degree that would be more applicable to my work in engineering. I looked into MBA programs, I looked into Engineering programs. Eventually, I looked back at my alma mater, at Purdue.

Purdue has an M.S.E. in Interdisciplinary Engineering, and one of the options is Engineering Management & Leadership. At the time I took the program, the business courses were offered in partnership with Thunderbird School of Global Management, leading to a Certificate in Global Management, and I decided that was what would work best for me.

Last fall I attended WE14, the Annual Conference for the Society of Women Engineers. This year was different, because it was held in conjunction with ICWES16, the International Conference on Women Engineers and Scientists.

I made a point on Saturday to go to some of the ICWES sessions. I don't see my notes, I think it was related to startup Technologies and Apps in Africa. There were a variety of attendees, including a diasporic student, studying engineering here in the United States (she asked about returning home, and was told that she would have to integrate her knowledge, to make what she learned here appropriate for life at home).

There were at least two other white women, I'm guessing undergraduate students or early career, who late in the Q&A portion asked about what they needed to know to write an App for Africa. After the speaker struggled to answer for a while, I spoke up.

Design, also, connects to culture. I've written about taking Globalization & Engineering. Another textbook for that course was From Global to Metanational: How Companies Win in the Knowledge Economy.  It described how a company in Detroit attempted to design an appliance (a washing machine, perhaps) for the Asian market, IIRC Singapore. A group of engineers from Singapore were brought to Detroit to help with the effort... but their efforts were not sufficient. The appliance was designed, exported, and failed in the market.