INTRODUCTION
Technology, purposeful human activity which involves designing and making products as diverse as clothing, foods, artefacts, machines, structures, electronic devices and computer systems, collectively often referred to as “the made world”. Technology can also mean the special kind of knowledge which technologists use when solving practical problems (for example, designing and building an irrigation system for tropical agriculture). Such work often begins with a human want (for example, better safety for an infant passenger in a car) or an aspiration (for example, to see the inside of a human artery or to land on the Moon), and technologists draw on resources of many kinds including visual imagination, technical skills, tools, and scientific and other branches of knowledge. Technological activity is as old as human history and its impact on almost all aspects of people's lives has been profound.
DESIGN
A common feature of technological activity, no matter what outcome is in mind, is the ability to design. In common with technology, design is difficult to define briefly although the general statement that it is “the exercise of imagination in the specification of form” captures much of what is involved.
The aim of design is to give some form, pattern, structure, or arrangement to an intended technological product so that it is an integrated and balanced whole which will do what is intended. Designing often begins with an idea in a person's mind and the designer has to be able to envisage situations, transformations, and outcomes, and model these in the mind's eye. In the 19th century James Nasmyth, when describing how he had invented his steam pile driver, said that the machine “was in my mind's eye long before I saw it in action”; he could “build up in the mind mechanical structures and set them to work in imagination”. Much of this thinking is non-verbal and visual; it also involves creativity, including the ability to put together ideas in new ways. Sometimes this is a solitary activity, and was often thus in the past, but many designers today work in teams where discussion, sketches, and other visual representations, as well as analogies and ideas plucked from apparently unconnected fields, can all help the process.
One problem which designers face is that the requirements that a product has to fulfil are not always compatible: ease of maintenance, for example, may conflict with cost and aesthetic appearance; safety considerations may not be reconciled easily with completion of the work by the deadline; and materials chosen on technical grounds for their suitability may raise concerns on environmental or moral grounds (for example, waste disposal difficulties; production by unacceptable methods such as exploited labour). Compromise and optimization are necessary when designing.
Designing is sometimes represented as a linear or a looped set of processes—starting with identification of a problem or requirement, followed by generation of ideas for solutions; selection of a promising design option is then detailed, made, and finally evaluated. In reality the processes are almost always less orderly than this. Experience from making, for instance, can feed back and lead to modifications in the design. Also, evaluation is an on-going process throughout the stages. It is also the case that the processes of designing can differ according to the product involved. For example, designing active matrix liquid crystal displays, involving the use of basic scientific research, is different from designing corkscrews or mousetraps. Similarly, designing for manufacture on a large scale may require modifications to an artefact that was designed for use, but only as a one-off product.
TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE
Although technology and science have many features in common—not least in the minds of many people who link them together when viewed as present-day bodies of practice—their goals and how they judge success tend to differ.
In its most basic form, science is driven by curiosity and speculation about the natural world without thought of any immediate application. It aims to produce theories which can be tested experimentally in the public domain and which are valued according to criteria such as simplicity, elegance, comprehensiveness, and range of explanatory power. By no means all that goes on under the name of science has this “blue-sky”, unconstrained quality; so-called strategic science, for example, is focused more on yielding knowledge that might assist the subsequent development of, as yet unidentified, winning products and processes in the market-place.
Technology, on the other hand, has the goal of creating and improving artefacts and systems to satisfy human wants or aspirations. Success is judged in terms of considerations such as efficiency of performance, reliability, durability, cost of production, ecological impact, and end-of-life disposability. It has sometimes been said that whereas the output from science is a published paper for all to read and criticize, that from technology is a patent conferring sole ownership of the invention on the holder.
For many centuries technological advances of great significance were made without benefit of knowledge from science. The notable achievements of Asian technology by the end of the first millennium AD in fields such as iron production, printing, and hydraulic engineering, including dams, canals, and irrigation systems, are well documented. In southern Asia, at a later period, the high quality of Indian textile products, especially painted and printed cotton goods, set standards which were an incentive to technological developments in Britain.
Water wheels, canal locks, barbed wire (without which the American West could not have been opened up), food preservation, fermentation and many metallurgical processes are other instances where technology ran ahead of science. The relationship underwent change especially in the late 19th century with the growth of the chemical and electrical power industries; in these, scientific knowledge was of direct use in the solving of problems and the development of products, although it was rarely sufficient on its own. At a later date the communications and electronics industries provided further testimony to the effectiveness of a closer relationship between science and technology, as indeed did the experience of World War II and subsequent more local military conflicts.
By the second half of the 20th century, much modern technology was intimately related to scientific knowledge, and science itself had become increasingly linked to technology through its dependence upon complex instrumentation to explore the natural world. A technological innovation such as nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, a diagnostic technique widely used in medicine, could not have been developed without scientific knowledge of the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. The symbiotic and synergistic relationship between modern technology and modern science has led some to use the term technoscience to describe what they see as now an essentially merged, even hybrid, enterprise.
Whether merged or not today, in the past science and technology have often followed independent paths. Furthermore, in so far as any relationship was acknowledged, it was most frequently seen as hierarchical, with technology practice trailing dependently in the wake of scientific theory. This notion that technology was merely applied science enjoyed wide currency in Euro-American circles, and beyond, throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Today there would be little support for it. A more widely accepted model of the relationship is that of two different but interdependent communities of practice which overlap and intermesh in their activities. However, the scientific knowledge constructed by scientists in their search for understanding of natural phenomena is not always in a form which enables it to be used directly and effectively in technological tasks. It often has to be reworked and translated into a form which relates better to the design parameters involved.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Historical accounts of technology can be constructed from many different perspectives, each of which may help in the understanding of this complex enterprise.
At the most general level, attempts have been made to discern and characterize distinctive periods in the evolution of technology. Writing in the 1930s, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset identified three. In the first and longest period, there were no systematic techniques for the discovery and development of technological devices. The earliest toolmakers' achievements such as stone axes, scrapers, and control of fire were no more than the products of chance. In the second period, certain technological skills had become sufficiently conscious to be passed from one generation to the next by accomplished practitioners. These craftsmen, however, had no systematic body of knowledge about their devices. Possession of this kind of knowledge, resulting from analytical modes of thought associated with modern science, characterized the third period and empowered people—in a radically different way from previously—to realize their technological goals.
CONTROL OF TECHNOLOGY
The extent to which technology is under human control is an important question, the answer to which has profound implications for how people perceive technology. On the one hand, there are the social constructionists who believe that technology is a tool shaped by the bidding of its creators or, at least, that it is social groups who define and give meaning to artefacts. A motor car is, after all, not just a means of transport: it can be a status symbol, a reflection of self-image, a source of Treasury revenue, a criminal's machine for ram-raiding, a competitor to rail travel provisions, the basis for a manufacturing or service job, and much more besides. On the other hand there is the view that, once launched, technology assumes a life of its own as an autonomous agent of change, driving history. Far from being society's servant, technology is society's master, increasingly shaping our destinies in ways which seem inevitable and irreversible. According to believers in this technological determinism, we are progressively being manoeuvred into ways of acting, both in the home and in employment, which are not of our deliberate choosing, but which are dictated by the technologies we have created. Instead of our values shaping technology, technology is shaping our values. The motor car was not invented to support out-of-town shopping and the depopulation of city centres; air pollution by exhaust emissions was not a planned outcome; the sacrificing of tracts of countryside and areas of natural beauty for additional roads to reduce traffic congestion was never intended by the pioneer manufacturers; nor was the association of fast cars with crime.
Flyer Spinning Frame Introduced by Richard Arkwright in 1769, the flyer spinning frame (also called the throstle or roll-drawing machine) reflects the move towards automation that characterized the Industrial Revolution. The machine is powered by the drive wheel at the bottom, drawing out the fibre into thread, then twisting it as it is wound onto the bobbins.Dorling Kindersley
Between the poles of social constructivism and technological determinism there are intermediate positions for which historical evidence lends some support. Large, complex technological systems seem capable of developing a momentum of their own and technologies can display latent inclinations that predispose people to develop certain lifestyles rather than others. Fortunately, neither momentum nor inclination is irresistible. An example is the development of anti-pollution technology, with legislation to support it, in the case of the motor car. What does appear to be the case, however, is that technology is not only a moral activity, but a political one as well. The exercise of technological choice requires democratic political institutions where the effects and possible impacts of technological change can be openly addressed and their compatibility with personal and society's goals assessed
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