Technology

I

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.

II

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.

III

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.

IV

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.

Also in the 1930s, Lewis Mumford published his classic work Technics and Civilization, including an analysis of the last 1,000 years of the development of technology in terms of three successive, but overlapping and interpenetrating, phases. The first, “eotechnic” phase (roughly ad 1000 to 1750) was characterized by raw materials such as wood, glass, and water, with increased use of horse power and energy from wind and water. This was followed by a “palaeotechnic” phase (roughly 1750 to 1900) a period of “carboniferous capitalism” characterized by a coal and iron complex and the steam engine. Beyond this came a “neotechnic” phase, with science prominent and an electricity-alloy complex with new materials such as plastics coming into use. Electrical energy and diesel and petrol combustion engines replaced the steam engine.

Despite similarities, both of these analyses fail to reflect the impact of technology or the technological characteristics of the late 20th century. Achievements here include new fabrication resources, including composites and “smart” materials which can respond to changes around them and behave as if possessing a memory. Technology has extended into the realm of the living with, for example, genetically engineered strains of “improved” plants and animals. Nuclear power is an alternative, if controversial, energy source. Dramatically enhanced means of communication and information processing are widely available and there has been a substantial growth of complex socio-technical systems relating to almost every aspect of work and everyday life—such as the ones encountered at the supermarket checkout or when buying a flight ticket.

The scale of these technological innovations and the speed of their implementation are quite different from anything experienced in previous phases of the evolution of technology. At the same time a distinguishing feature of the age has been a growing awareness of negative aspects of technology. Technological disasters of unprecedented magnitude have occurred and been widely publicized: the list is long and includes spillages from giant oil tankers; the 1984 tragedy at Bhopal, India, when an explosion at the Union Carbide chemicals plant led to the escape of methyl isocyanate and the death of over 3,000 people, the worst industrial accident to date; the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster, when the spacecraft exploded just after the launch killing seven astronauts; and also in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster when a fire in the core of a Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl' in Ukraine resulted in 31 deaths and the spewing out of deposits of radioactive debris, which fell on many regions of the world—the world's worst nuclear industry accident.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—widely known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992—brought into prominence issues such as climatic change, sustainable development, and the more responsible management of global resources, with particular regard to environmental pollution, waste disposal, and a reduction in the gap in technological capacity between developed and developing countries. In this spectacular new phase, as the 20th century closes, any characterization of technology would be incomplete if it failed to acknowledge its inescapable moral dimension. Perhaps no other technological developments have more vividly brought home this realization than those in the field of atomic energy since the dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. As Robert Oppenheimer, scientific leader of the Manhattan Project which produced the original bombs, later remarked: “the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose”.

Less comprehensive historical studies have shed further light on the nature and development of technology. A broad distinction can be drawn between so-called internalist and contextualist accounts. In the internalist description the focus is predominantly on the design features of the particular devices and on related matters such as the nature of technical improvements and the stimulus provided to other inventions. Medieval fortifications, ploughs and ploughshares, keyboard mechanisms, clocks, steel cantilever bridges, chain mail, steam engines, space rockets, and the mariner's compass have been, and are typical, subjects for internalist histories. Informative though these are, such accounts tend to provide little in the way of explanation of why artefacts have taken the form they did and why mutations in those artefacts have occurred.

In contrast, contextualist accounts place emphasis on the cultural factors which have influenced, and have been influenced by, technological developments. The economic, social, and political ambience in which the technological activity took place and in which it assumed its particular form becomes the focus of historical investigation.

Other external factors, for example geographical, legal, and environmental constraints, may also affect the shaping of technology and, in turn, contribute to a view of technology as itself an influence on the cultural context. For example, the study of the consequences for workers in the machine-tool industry of a technological development such as automation has served to locate technology in a political context and to highlight questions about the identity and motives of the social and managerial groups who took decisions about the particular form which the technology should assume.

A premise here is that there is nothing inevitable about any technological development. It could always have been different; other options were available. The technology we encounter is the result of decisions which reflect the value judgements of those who were in a position to shape the technology. It would seem that form not only follows function, but power as well.