After almost 15 years of working in communications and advertising in Colombia as Creative Director and in Guatemala as General Creative Director, Pablo Zuloaga, a Los Cerros alumnus (like his father) from the class of 2002, retired from advertising to give more meaning to his life and his ideas. In this path of reconversion, he dedicated himself to developing planet-centered technology educational methodologies and community innovation workshops in Spain, Portugal, Guatemala and ColombiaThe aim is to provide people with certain knowledge or skills to help them face the challenges of this new technological era, without ignoring the importance of the planet's resources and the environment in this process..
"In 2019 after a series of things that were happening in my life, I make the decision to leave advertising and go to Barcelona to do a master's degree in emerging futures design, and I focus my thesis on looking at how to make small farmers more resilient to climate change."
His experience in Guatemala and Colombia, working on social campaigns for UNICEF, the Ministry of Defense, Save the Children, USAID, International Justice Mission and other NGOs, led him to appreciate more and more what his agency in Guatemala called "the most important thing in Guatemala". "The healing power of creativity". So he decided to do something bigger with his talent, which had already won awards at numerous international advertising festivals.
"In advertising we settle for an award as a goal, but the ideas that win these awards, many times they are not even real, or the creative pays for them...that's why now I try to make ideas that really reach people, that really help them and really solve their problems."
In 2020, as part of his master's thesis, he presented the first stage of a technology education methodology for rural communities, which was awarded as the best thesis of the program.. Along with this, Pablo continued in Barcelona prototyping a climate simulator for growing plants in future speculative environments called POWAR (the "Plant Observatory of Weather Adaptability for Resiliense)which is an Open Source, low-cost device that is being developed to help school children learn about climate change and technology in a more practical way, this project is already in the process of being implemented in Los Cerros.
At the same time Pablo was developing this simulator, also started to collaborate with the Innovation departments of Barcelona and Hospitalet.The project is focused on the construction or provision of small community and rural innovation laboratories, bringing people closer to technologies such as robotics, programming, Arduino electronics or IoT devices, 3D printing and digital fabrication in general, which is of great interest in Los Cerros.
In these labs he also began to develop workshops to teach the community about the environment and technology. He also began to be invited to give talks on digital fabrication, innovation and food futures, and remote workshops in Portugal with design students who have collaborated in the evolution of his project.
"In recent years, I have acquired certain skills or knowledge, which have allowed me to see the world in a different way, and although I am not an expert in any of these, I look for ways to transmit them to people, so that I can somehow change their lives."
From Gimnasio de Los Cerros school we are proud to have among our students our alumni success stories like these. It is important for us to publicize success stories of our alumni, and we are already in contact with Pablo to implement the teaching in technology and environment that he has been developing; this to encourage more and more our students to become actors of change.
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