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What Is Technology?

This material is connected with The Open University Computing and IT credentials.

The function and impact of innovation in both our individual and working lives is ever growing. Understanding how individuals shape innovation and how technology forms individuals’s interactions with each other and the natural world is essential – not just for those who research, establish and carry out new innovations, but likewise for all those individuals and organisations that have to use those innovations in their working and personal lives.

Technology is not a neutral word. Different individuals will offer it various significance depending on their viewpoint and context.

Members of the Faculty of Technology are no different, but for several years we have actually embraced one specific definition of innovation that reflects our own aims and goals:

There are 3 essential elements to this meaning:

1. Technology is about acting to meet a human requirement instead of simply understanding the workings of the natural world, which is the objective of science. The creation of the microscopic lense was driven by a requirement to explore the world of the little, beyond our unaided vision. This technological service to a long standing problem has in turn allowed us to understand more the operations of the world which in turn has actually caused the development of more technologies.

2. It uses much more than scientific knowledge and consists of values as much as facts, practical craft understanding as much as theoretical understanding. The iPod is an example of where the physics of making a small device bring so much music is married with innovative style to make a renowned need to have accessory.

3. It involves organised ways of doing things. It covers the desired and unexpected interactions in between items (makers, gadgets, artifacts) and the people and systems who make them, use them or are affected by them through numerous procedures. Many individuals like to drink coffee, typically in a coffee store. That coffee may have come from trees which have been reproduced specifically for increased yields that support a small farmer and his household but that needs pesticides that were developed and manufactured in another country. The collected coffee beans will themselves be transferred around the globe, to be processed and put in bundles which are dispersed to shops that then make the cup of coffee in a polystyrene cup that was manufactured for the purpose but which then requires to disposed of and so on. Every option we make depends on, and feeds, an extremely synergistic and far reaching way of living where some have much and some have little.

Technology is a hands-on, can-do occupation where people have to be knowledgeable in a number of the following: engineering, communicating, designing, establishing, innovating, managing, manufacturing, modelling, and systems believing. But technology also provides us numerous products which can be utilized for great or ill or where the benefits are challenged and similarly the processes associated with producing and utilizing technology implies that we must all take an interest in whether it supplies us and everybody else with a sustainable future.

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