Reconsidering the Meaning of "New" Technology
A critical piece to technological success in an emerging era of the green (or sustainable) design marketplace is to, not just create cool, cutting edge technologies, but to also define design itself differently so that technology’s underlying processes comply with the new principles of triple bottom line (sustainability) management. That is, we must redesign our underlying methods for designing technologies. To do this, we will have to take a much bigger look at how we define – not just the end-result, but also reconsider the actual design processes themselves by asking questions such as: ‘why’ are we designing a given technology in the first place?, ‘how’ does this technology need to be created with alternative design principles in mind (see Bucky Fuller’s Design Science as an example)?, ‘what’ will be different about the form and function of the end-product?, ‘who’ does the technology affect?, and what is its (w)holistic impact on the greater earth ecology of living systems?
I’d love to hear from you all what you and your teams are doing to make this shift in technology design thinking.
Vic Desotelle
http://DiscoveryFuel.com
Similar Posts:
- Defining a Regenerative Commerce System
- Social Innovation … What is it really?
- Building a Sustainable Enterprise: Considerations for Effective Application
- How We Create Meaning Together
- Technology's Influence on Behavior Changes
Inquiry: Starting everyone of my questions with ‘open ended’ question words including the 6 ‘W’s: WHY is it this way, WHAT is it exactly, (w)HOW does it work, WHO is involved, WHEN is it enacted, WHERE does it reside or show up. In this way, your research will expand from isolated assumptions into broader understandings and improve data outcomes.
A more challenging but (in my view) more fun part of development, is enabling your research into a ‘social performance’ process for creating social capital and social innovation. This is done through 3 phases as follows (note ‘phases’ are different than ‘stages’):