Dear readers, welcome to my space where the worlds of writing and technology intersect. On the pages of this blog, I will tell you about my creative path, share some thoughts about my own experience in technology creation, as well as narrate how my literature skills helped in building innovative solutions in the IT field.
My name is Anna Sher and I am a Ukrainian writer and R&D Product Manager.
As my writing skills emerged earlier in my life, let me start with that story first.
Literature path
"Can someone become a writer when you are not a big fan of reading the books? Yes, it could happen. As a child I didn’t like to read."
It’s hard to imagine, but my first writing attempts happened much earlier than a conscious desire to read the books arose. In my case, actually, the writing encouraged me to read more books and not vice versa.
My literature journey started at the age of 12 when I wrote a sarcastic story about my classmate and to my great surprise, I got the approval from my teacher to read it aloud in front of the whole class, including that exact classmate. Lack of disapproval and criticism played a key role in order not to suppress the germs of desire for further writing experiments. It was the inception. Later came some poems, essays which have never been published, and a couple of small articles in the local newspapers. However, after finishing high school I firmly decided that I would certainly write a book someday.
I turned 24 when I started working on the first serious piece which was a novel based on a real story. Literally in a couple of months, after one-third of the book was already written, feeling sorrow I gave up writing that novel. I realized that the story and its heroes which once inspired me so much, was not worth being told about. From today’s perspective, I am happy that the work left only a file on my laptop. But no doubt, it was a very valuable experience to learn that I’m craving to write and need to try again (and again)…
"Some stories we want to tell about need to go through the ‘time check’ before publishing. Because only the time can show whether our point of view is right. Writers need to have a courage to leave some writings as a file on their laptop labeled ‘not for sharing’, sometimes forever. Otherwise, it can damage someone, or the writer’s reputation."
Thereafter the long process of self-awareness, defining of a literature genre, and searching for an idea deserving to be heard began. I only published a couple of professional articles since then. But ten years later an amazing moment occurred. It was a usual autumn evening, I was standing at the bus station when suddenly, like thunder in the clear sky, the full concept of “Elysium” utopia dawned on me. This time I completed the work on the novel. I sincerely invite you to open for yourselves this guide which will walk you through different countries of the world and the actual and common problems the societies are facing.
My journey in IT
Having two high educations in the field of economics and working experience in banking, for the last 10 years I have been working in the IT area, going through the typical product manager’s path, from business analyst role to product owner and finally to product manager position.
"Throughout my life I have always been interested in IT. On the other hand, I strived to write. It was only a matter of time when these two inspirations intersect."
My first contact with information technologies occurred in 2000 when I decided to enroll in a Pascal programming course. Back in the beginning of the 2000s programming still was not mainstream and nobody from my inner circle was interested in this topic and never discussed it. It is difficult to grasp where this curiosity came from, but this spark of interest started my IT track.
In fact, I ignored my new passion and “chose” (very often parents decided what their children should study in the university at those times) a different education path. Although it didn’t work out here without technologies either. In the middle of the 2000s in my master’s thesis in economics, I suggested a novel approach for the analysis of enterprise’s accounts payable applying the neural networks. Retrospectively, I can see that I approached the topic in quite an innovative manner given the level of development and adaption of machine learning in the mid-2000s for solving industry problems in Ukraine and the world in general; as well as given the fact I didn’t have deep knowledge in any programming language or data science. Frankly speaking, only in recent years I have understood what it is all about. But at the moment of thesis drafting that vision came to my mind somehow intuitively. Maybe because of a subconscious belief in the power of technology. The belief that might have sprouted from that Pascal programming course.
"My IT journey was not accidental."
I started my professional career path according to my education, I performed audits, analyzed and optimized companies’ business processes. Very often the suggestions in business process optimization were related to automation. Thus, with each next assignment, I interacted with the IT department more and more often. Thanks to this cooperation I had a chance to dive deeper into the area of technologies. It was a so-called aha moment when some imperceptible connection happened between me and IT. I had an irresistible desire to become a part of that world in order to create and make the Earth a better place to live (at least my vision is in leveraging technology only for ethical purposes). That exact minute I decided to change my occupation. It was a thorny path, I had to learn a lot of new things and suffered from impostor syndrome for a while. But it was worth the effort. It was the only way to reveal some of my potential.
Crossroads of the worlds
An interesting transformation happened when I joined the research and development department of an IT company. My main task there was to create new technologies and solutions, as well as to help innovative engineers find the best possible application for their research ideas. Back then it was the most creative and free environment I had a chance to work in during all years of my IT career.
The freedom to create, experiment, and suggest ideas led to scientific experiments headed by me which as a result were bundled into the separate new service launched at the company and the literature played here a key role.
The starting point falls to the period when I was tasked to build a demo for a scientific-oriented conference using the new technology I used to work with. The underlying idea was to create an immersive experience where an audio story supplemented with environmental sound design is augmented with an additional layer of sensation – the sense of touch. Thus, a listener could hear not only the phrase “cold keys in your hand” along with the sound of keys clanking but also tactilely feel cold by the hand via a special device, making the listener deeply immersed in the narration.
For this project, I suggested a concept of the experience as well as wrote the text of the essay. It was the second month of the full-scale war, so the story was dedicated to Ukraine and strong belief in Ukraine’s Victory. The experience was called “The Touching Story”. You can read the scientific paper about the innovation here.
In this manner, my writing skills became the driver for the creation of an innovative multi-modal immersive experience. This is when “the crossroads of unexpected worlds”, an astonishing symbiosis of writing and IT, came to life.
"'The Touching Story' triggered the crossroads of unexpected worlds."
Later there was a project aimed at creating an interesting and attracting attention experience for the largest conference in the IT world – WebSummit. And again, the skills from another universe, different from IT, came to help. There is another scientific paper published about this innovation.
I developed and proposed several concepts of potential solutions and the marketing department chose the idea of “Fortune Teller”. It was the experience giving a visitor the possibility to interact with a futuristic digital human and get a prediction about their role in the metaverse. The user can see, hear, and feel different tactile sensations during the interaction with the digital human. At the end of the experience, the visitors receive their AI-generated futuristic digital profile.
Since then, I had many opportunities to invent different worlds and concepts and write narratives and scenarios for my next projects. After several successful initiatives built for internal purposes, I managed to start the service on the company level aimed to create immersive experiences for our external clients. This service requires a powerful creative component, as it is based on the artistic combination of technologies, developing scenarios, characters, legends, etc.
"Writing skills made the emergence of innovative solutions possible. The experience in the IT field makes it feasible to write about it, in my book as well."
The above-mentioned projects, as well as my own phenomenon of “crossroads of unexpected worlds”, were feasible only because people like me were empowered to suggest own ideas and implement those using all available and untypical for their role skills (like me as R&D Product Manager writing scenarios and characters or my colleague, a 3D Designer, designing the textile’s print for the costume we sew for the conference).
Conclusions
Writing this blog, I was curious to analyze how could happen that so seemingly distant worlds of writing and IT collided at some point. It appeared that some hidden skills can be with us for a long time and they could even let us know about their existence. But we could just not notice them or didn’t pay much attention to them.
My experience of the creation of the immersive experiences mentioned above showed that only a unique combination of technologies and scenarios of their application makes them exceptional. The same can be said about professionals or creative people, the unique mix of skills, especially strange or opposite to each other, illogical, untypical can really make one outstanding.
The aim of this article is not only to share my own story but also to inspire my readers to revise their talents and urge them not to be afraid to propose their renewed formula of ‘uniqueness’ to this world. This should help us in driving the changes for a better future.