The Nature of Technology Strand Explanatory Papers Updated May 2010
Characteristics of Technology
Key Ideas
Technology is a unique form of human activity. This component of the Nature of Technology strand sits within an overarching view that sees technology as a group of socially embedded activities, termed Technological Practice, that are driven by human will, in response to need, desire, and/or opportunity. Key to this practice is its purposeful and productive nature. This means that outcomes are arrived at through an intentional process of design, decision making, production, and manufacturing, rather than through processes of the natural world or things occurring by chance. Key aspects of Technological Practice include the brief development practices, planning and resource management practices, and the designing, construction, processing, and evaluation practices of producing outcomes. Manufacturing practices are also important in technology as they seek to take Technological Outcomes and ensure their ongoing production.
Needs, desires, and the identification of possible opportunities provide the initial impetus for Technological Practice to be undertaken to develop fit for purpose Technological Outcomes. Technological outcomes include technological products and systems developed to extend human sensory perception and/or physical ability. In this way, they serve as a means of extending the 'natural' functioning of the human body. For example, microscopes and telescopes allow for the extension of our sense of sight, while horse-driven wagons, cars, planes, and spacecraft allow for the extension of our ability to transport ourselves. Not all Technological Practice results in completed Technological Outcomes – that is, fully realised and situated technological products or systems. Other outcomes of Technological Practice include such things as a brief describing an outcome, a feasibility argument, design ideas for parts of an outcome, conceptual designs of a technological product or system, models, and prototypes that have yet to be trialled in situ. While not Technological Outcomes as such, they are valid outcomes for practising technologists and for students when undertaking their own Technological Practice.
Viewing technology as a socially embedded human activity allows for the development of understandings of technology that recognise and value that what is designed is always positioned within a particular time, and physical and social location. Therefore, the social world of culture, politics, and dominant ideologies of the time, as well as the natural world, combine to influence the nature of technological developments. Technology in turn has a profound and complex influence on the social and natural world through its creation of the made world.
Technology, understood as inseparable from society and the environment, allows space for ways of looking at the world differently to produce innovative solutions and create technologies that may well alter our perceptions of what it is to be human. For example, the interface between humans and artificial intelligence and robotics challenges our ideas of the boundaries between people and machines in ways far greater than earlier uses of technology that supported more 'traditional' ways of being human, such as the development and use of artificial limbs or pacemakers.
Such a view of technology brings together two alternative perspectives (technological determinism and social shaping of technology) that have often been discussed. The technological determinist perspective sees technology as determining social change, while the social shaping perspective sees society as determining technological development. Bringing these perspectives together allows for the recognition of both these perspectives in that technology and society are intertwined in complex and often difficult-to-determine ways. This view is referred to as a socio-technological perspective.
Creative and critical thinking are important to technologists for developing and exploring initial design concepts, refining and selecting those that are feasible, and in the way in which they realise these concepts in a material sense as Technological Outcomes. This combination of informed creativity and critical reflection encourages technologists to push boundaries, learn from the past, and project into future possibilities. Technology is underpinned by reasoned decision making. This reasoning relies on both functional and practical reasoning. Functional reasoning focuses on knowing how and why things work. Practical reasoning focuses on knowing what is justifiable in social and ethical terms and is based on what 'should' or 'ought' to be done. This can be described as normative in nature. That is, things that deal with what has value, what is 'good' and 'bad', and what is considered 'right' and 'wrong'. All normative aspects reflect social and cultural morals and ethics of particular groups of people within specific environments and eras.
Practical reasoning, therefore, provides the normative element of technology. Without this element, or if functional reasoning is overly emphasised, technology may be perceived, and indeed practiced, in a restrictive and technical way.
While Technological Practice is based upon the 'best' knowledge available to technologists and reasoned decision making, there are always unknown and unexpected consequences when Technological Practice is undertaken and Technological Outcomes implemented and/or manufactured. This is particularly so when manufacturing raises sustainability and/or quality control issues not apparent in the development of a one-off outcome or when technological products and/or systems are transferred to settings that they were not specifically designed for. Examples of this can be found where Technological Outcomes developed for first world countries were inappropriately transplanted into third world countries as aid. For example, solar ovens were used as containers because using fire as an energy source was the socially accepted norm.
Recognition that Technological Practices, and their resulting outcomes, often have different value across people, places, and times, is important in understanding technology and its power and limitations. While technology can be thought of as seeking to enhance human capability, in reality not all Technological Outcomes are beneficial or useful to all people. In fact, some Technological Outcomes are developed to purposefully disadvantage some people, as in the case of war technologies. Establishing the worth of any technological development, therefore, relies on critical analyses that take into account historical precedents and a multiplicity of social, cultural, and political perspectives.
Technology is interdisciplinary in nature, but it is also a discipline in its own right. Technological practice draws on technological knowledge and skills, as well as a breadth of knowledge and skills from other disciplines as required by the specific context being explored (for example, science, mathematics, art, philosophy, psychology, and ethics). An important part of understanding technology, therefore, is to understand what makes technological knowledge different to knowledge from other disciplines so that they can be used in mutually supportive and enhancing ways.
Contemporary understandings suggest that all knowledge is socially constructed as a result of people's interactions with each other and the world in which they live. Different disciplines, therefore, can be thought of as validating specific knowledge as it has developed from shared understandings of a particular group of experts within that discipline.
This is no different for technological knowledge. However, what is different is the basis upon which people judge technological knowledge to be worthy of inclusion within such shared understandings. The basis upon which experts validate or measure the worthiness, or not, of new ideas put forward is known as the epistemic basis. In technology, this basis is focussed on whether the knowledge provides for the successful functioning of a Technological Outcome. This is different to scientific knowledge; the epistemic basis of scientific knowledge is focussed on its ability to provide the most successful explanation for phenomenon in the world. This difference reflects the difference in the purpose of the two disciplines. That is, the purpose of technology is to intervene in the world, whereas the purpose of science is to explain the world.
Technological knowledge can be used as rules or regulations. For this to occur, technological knowledge becomes codified, but only after technological experts consider they have adequate evidence to validate it as such. Codified technological knowledge refers to such things as codes of practice, codes of ethics, intellectual property codes, codes of standards, and material tolerances. Codified knowledge serves to remind technologists of their responsibilities and provide them with access to established knowledge and procedures that have been shown to support successful technological development in the past. In this way codified knowledge can be used to provide constructional, processing, manufacturing, and ethical and/or legal compliance constraints on contemporary technological developments.
The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of contemporary technology requires that technologists engage in more integrated forms of technological development where collaborative activity between people and across disciplines is critical for success. Recognising the differences between knowledge across disciplines, and establishing the value of each within particular contexts, is important in interdisciplinary work. Interdisciplinary collaboration in technology provides exciting opportunities to 'work at the boundaries' of established fields. However, this may cause situations where no codified technological knowledge exists to guide practice, or existing codes are no longer adequate. This may lead to tensions between people and the potential for an increase in unknown and unintended consequences. Collaboration, therefore, often requires technologists to engage in constructive debate, carry out informed prioritisation based on extensive functional modelling and multiple perspectives, and employ sophisticated strategies for decision making within their practice.
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