1 What Is Technology?
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This content is associated with The Open University Computing and IT qualifications.

The role and effect of technology in both our personal and working lives is ever growing. Understanding how individuals form innovation and how technology shapes people's interactions with each other and the natural world is necessary - not just for those who research, develop and implement new technologies, however likewise for all those people and organisations that have to utilize those innovations in their working and individual lives.
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Technology is not a neutral word. Different people will provide it different significance depending upon their perspective and context.

Members of the Faculty of Technology are no different, but for many years we have adopted one specific meaning of technology that shows our own objectives and objectives:

There are 3 important aspects to this meaning:

1. Technology has to do with doing something about it to satisfy a human need instead of merely comprehending the functions of the natural world, which is the goal of science. The innovation of the microscopic lense was driven by a requirement to explore the world of the small, beyond our unaided vision. This technological option to a long standing issue has in turn enabled us to understand more the operations of the world which in turn has actually caused the advancement of more innovations.

2. It utilizes a lot more than scientific knowledge and includes worths as much as facts, useful craft knowledge as much as theoretical knowledge. The iPod is an example of where the physics of making a little device bring so much music is wed with imaginative style to make a renowned need to have device.

3. It involves organised methods of doing things. It covers the designated and unintentional interactions in between products (devices, devices, artifacts) and the people and systems who make them, utilize them or are impacted by them through different processes. Lots of people like to consume coffee, often in a coffee bar. That coffee may have come from trees which have been bred specifically for increased yields that support a small farmer and his family but that needs pesticides that were established and produced in another country. The gathered coffee beans will themselves be carried around the globe, to be processed and placed in packages which are dispersed to shops that then make the cup of coffee in a polystyrene cup that was made for the function but which then requires to disposed of and so on. Every choice we make relies on, and feeds, a highly interdependent and far reaching way of living where some have much and some have little.

Technology is a hands-on, can-do profession where people need to be skilled in much of the following: engineering, communicating, creating, establishing, innovating, handling, production, modelling, and systems believing. But innovation likewise offers us different products which can be utilized for excellent or ill or where the benefits are challenged and similarly the processes associated with producing and using innovation indicates that we ought to all take an interest in whether it provides us and everyone else with a sustainable future.

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