I'm a typical knowledge worker and Internet evangelist (based in Luxembourg/Europe) since the Internet's early years. As an economist and interdisciplinarist, I immediatly had a vision of how the Internet and the information society would change the way we live and work. So I decided to start my own consultancy in 1997. I now have almost 10 years of experience in major Internet, Intranet, Extranet, e-business, e-goverment, e-democracy, online communication, knowledge management and information technology projects as well as in general business consulting & development.
Due to my many projects with major government agencies in Luxembourg, I also have a good network with high level officials. This allows me to help foreign Internet & e-business companies who want to settle a subsidary or their european headquarters in Luxembourg as part of the Luxembourg government e-cluster policy. Luxembourg offers a lot of advantages to those companies which is already illustrated through the presence of a.o. Apple-iTunes, AOL, Amazon, Microsoft and Skype.
To further develop my vision of the networked economy and society, I recently joined a multidisciplinary design consultancy company (
www.integratedPlace.com) focusing on product design, communication design, interaction design & transformation design. We apply human-centered design methodologies to a variety of areas, ranging from traditional product design through information system design to innovation & service design. Our future private, public and work environments will be more and more hybrid environments where the physical space & objects, the virtual information and the interaction space will converge, requiring consistent information architectures and user experiences amongst different media & spaces.
To make the integration of the physical and the virtual world as neat as possible, the combination of information system design, industrial design, product & interior design & business consulting expertise should be a winning team as the demand for hybrid systems, services & environments will grow. Closely looked at, most of the usability, architectural, communicational and processing principles of good virtual online systems and good physical spaces are almost identical.
The evolution to an ever more connected world is irreversible and offers a lot of potential advantges and pogress to our society. I prefer to be a creative and responsible architect for that world rather than being a critique of it.
(My LinkedIn profile page:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvaincottong)
