This material is associated with The Open University Computing and IT qualifications.

The role and impact of technology in both our individual and working lives is ever growing. Understanding how people shape technology and how technology shapes individuals's interactions with each other and the natural world is essential - not just for those who research study, establish and execute brand-new innovations, however likewise for all those individuals and organisations that have to use those technologies in their working and personal lives.
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Technology is not a neutral word. Different individuals will offer it different significance depending on their viewpoint and context.

Members of the Faculty of Technology are no different, but for several years we have actually adopted one particular definition of innovation that shows our own goals and objectives:

There are three important aspects to this definition:

1. Technology is about doing something about it to fulfill a human need rather than merely comprehending the operations of the natural world, which is the goal of science. The invention of the microscope 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 allowed us to comprehend more the workings of the world which in turn has caused the development of more innovations.

2. It utilizes a lot more than scientific knowledge and consists of values as much as facts, practical craft knowledge as much as theoretical knowledge. The iPod is an example of where the physics of making a little device bring a lot music is wed with creative design to make a renowned must have device.

3. It includes organised ways of doing things. It covers the designated and unintentional interactions between products (machines, devices, artifacts) and the people and systems who make them, use them or are affected by them through different processes. Many individuals like to drink coffee, often in a coffeehouse. That coffee may have originated from trees which have actually been bred specifically for increased yields that support a little farmer and his family but that requires pesticides that were developed and made in another nation. The harvested coffee beans will themselves be carried worldwide, to be processed and put in bundles which are distributed to shops that then make the cup of coffee in a polystyrene cup that was made for the purpose however which then requires to disposed of and so on. Every option we make relies on, and feeds, a highly interdependent and far reaching way of life where some have much and some have little.

Technology is a hands-on, can-do occupation where individuals have to be knowledgeable in many of the following: engineering, interacting, creating, developing, innovating, managing, production, modelling, and systems thinking. But technology also provides us different products which can be used for excellent or ill or where the benefits are challenged and likewise the procedures involved in producing and using innovation implies that we should all take an interest in whether it supplies us and everybody else with a sustainable future.

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