Field Guide to Appropriate Technology

Field Guide to Appropriate Technology
Author: Barrett Hazeltine
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 889
Release: 2003-04-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0080469809

Field Guide to Appropriate Technology is an all-in-one "hands-on guide" for nontechnical and technical people working in less developed communities. It has been developed and designed with a prestigious team of authors, each of whom has worked extensively in developing societies throughout the world. This field guide includes: - Step-by-step instructions and illustrations showing how to build and maintain a vast array of appropriate technology systems and devices - Unique coverage on healthcare, basic business and project management, principles of design, promotion, scheduling, training, microlending, and more - Teachers, doctors, construction workers, forest and agricultural specialists, scientists and healthcare workers, and religious and government representatives will find this book a first source for advice - Step-by-step instructions and illustrations showing how to build and maintain a vast array of appropriate technology systems and devices - Unique coverage on healthcare, basic business and project management, principles of design, promotion, scheduling, training, microlending, and more - Teachers, doctors, construction workers, forest and agricultural specialists, scientists and healthcare workers, and religious and government representatives will find this book a first source for advice

Technology Choice

Technology Choice
Author: Kelvin W Willoughby
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000314162

This book attempts to provide a theoretical framework for answering difficult questions evoked by the concept of technology choice primarily by conducting a review of the Appropriate Technology movement and its ideas and experiments.

Sustainability Science and Technology

Sustainability Science and Technology
Author: Alejandro De Las Heras
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1466518081

Sustainability Science and Technology: An Introduction explains the root causes of global failures in natural and human systems, as well as the most readily available technological solutions. The book dispels risky scientific and technological ideas that further complicate the current environmental and socioeconomic predicaments. It also bridges gaps among scientific and technological fields and systematically translates current findings for a wide technical and public audience. Written at a level accessible to all, the story is told one bite-sized chapter at a time, about the size of a scientific journal article. The chapters are self-contained, each grappling with a large topic. This provides more in-depth coverage of a topic than a standard encyclopedia article and promotes the widest possible dialog around sustainability issues and their solutions. Case studies from all continents and all technological development levels expound viable solutions for each of the planetary systems: water, soils, and atmosphere. In turn, the wider socioeconomic context of sustainable science and technology is examined. One of the first books to address the full scope of sustainability, it sets the stage for discussion and sustainability re(training) across professional divides. The editor and contributors take a balanced approach that is neither too technical nor too focused on any particular field. They highlight global and regional perspectives and the linkages between different planetary and human systems. The book helps you understand the thorny essence of sustainability issues—often fraught with ethical dilemmas, obsolete technologies, and lifestyle implications—and how to develop solutions to them.

Technology of the Oppressed

Technology of the Oppressed
Author: David Nemer
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262543346

How Brazilian favela residents engage with and appropriate technologies, both to fight the oppression in their lives and to represent themselves in the world. Brazilian favelas are impoverished settlements usually located on hillsides or the outskirts of a city. In Technology of the Oppressed, David Nemer draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to provide a rich account of how favela residents engage with technology in community technology centers and in their everyday lives. Their stories reveal the structural violence of the information age. But they also show how those oppressed by technology don’t just reject it, but consciously resist and appropriate it, and how their experiences with digital technologies enable them to navigate both digital and nondigital sources of oppression—and even, at times, to flourish. Nemer uses a decolonial and intersectional framework called Mundane Technology as an analytical tool to understand how digital technologies can simultaneously be sites of oppression and tools in the fight for freedom. Building on the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, he shows how the favela residents appropriate everyday technologies—technological artifacts (cell phones, Facebook), operations (repair), and spaces (Telecenters and Lan Houses)—and use them to alleviate the oppression in their everyday lives. He also addresses the relationship of misinformation to radicalization and the rise of the new far right. Contrary to the simplistic techno-optimistic belief that technology will save the poor, even with access to technology these marginalized people face numerous sources of oppression, including technological biases, racism, classism, sexism, and censorship. Yet the spirit, love, community, resilience, and resistance of favela residents make possible their pursuit of freedom.

The AT Reader

The AT Reader
Author: Marilyn Carr
Publisher: Bootstrap Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1985
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN:

Technology and Human Development

Technology and Human Development
Author: Ilse Oosterlaken
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2015-05-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317672895

This book introduces the capability approach – in which wellbeing, agency and justice are the core values – as a powerful normative lens to examine technology and its role in development. This approach attaches central moral importance to individual human capabilities, understood as effective opportunities people have to lead the kind of lives they have reason to value. The book examines the strengths, limitations and versatility of the capability approach when applied to technology, and shows the need to supplement it with other approaches in order to deal with the challenges that technology raises. The first chapter places the capability approach within the context of broader debates about technology and human development – discussing amongst others the appropriate technology movement. The middle part then draws on philosophy and ethics of technology in order to deepen our understanding of the relation between technical artefacts and human capabilities, arguing that we must simultaneously ‘zoom in’ on the details of technological design and ‘zoom out’ to see the broader socio-technical embedding of a technology. The book examines whether technology is merely a neutral instrument that expands what people can do and be in life, or whether technology transfers may also impose certain views of what it means to lead a good life. The final chapter examines the capability approach in relation to contemporary debates about ‘ICT for Development’ (ICT4D), as the technology domain where the approach has been most extensively applied so far. This book is an invaluable read for students in Development Studies and STS, as well as policy makers, practitioners and engineers looking for an accessible overview of technology and development from the perspective of the capability approach.

Teaching about Technology

Teaching about Technology
Author: Marc J. de Vries
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2005-05-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781402034091

This book provides an introduction to the philosophy of technology that is accessible to non-philosophers. It offers a survey of the current state-of-affairs in the philosophy of technology and also discusses the relevance of that for teaching about technology. The book includes questions and assignments and offers an extensive annotated bibliography for those who want to read more about the discipline.

Technology And Social Change In Rural Areas

Technology And Social Change In Rural Areas
Author: Gene F Summers
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000314111

The possibility of nuclear war, the failure of the Green Revolution, the capabilities of genetic engineering, and other actual and potential effects of technological innovations have created demands for a more humane application of technology. Addressing this issue, Technology and Social Change in Rural Areas is a clear assessment of the current state of affairs. The book begins with a discussion of the changing paradigms of technology adoption and diffusion, the dynamics of public resistance, and the question of social responsibility in an age of synthetic biology. In subsequent sections, the contributors assess the revolutionary effect of technology on agriculture worldwide and conclude that radically new public policies are essential; expose the transformations of rural life and communities that result from the localized effects of technology and its use as a weapon in world-system politics; and critically examine the appropriate technology movement. The essays are presented to honor Professor Eugene A. Wilkening for his many pioneering and lasting contributions to the study of technology and rural social change. The book includes an intellectual biography of Professor Wilkening written by his long-time colleague and friend, William H. Sewell.