Design for Living Complexities

As promoting a richer and fuller living of life? Are there technologies or technology uses you love which draw you closer to other people and make you more acutely aware of the REAL important things in life? Because “storychasing” an oral history interview with someone involves things like listening, wondering, and asking, I think these activities with technology actually “humanize” us as individuals and in groups more than they “distance and distract.”

Worsening socioeconomic conditions in the Third World have underscored the urgency of implementing a development path that de-emphasizes growth and technological monoculture. The technological orientation of this development paradigm has been variously called intermediate, progressive, alternative, light-capital, labor-intensive, indigenous, appropriate, low-cost, community, soft, radical, liberatory, and convivial technology. However, appropriate technology, for reasons to be addressed later, has emerged as the allembracing rubric representing the viewpoints associated with all the other terms.

From Gandhi's perspective, any concern with goods requires mass production, but concern with people necessitates production by the masses. The Charkha (spinning wheel) was Gandhi's ideal appropriate technology device, and he saw in it a symbol of freedom, self-reliance, and a technical means that was right for India. The idea of technology discriminately enriching a minority of people at the expense of the majority or putting masses of people out of work to increase profit was in Gandhi's view counterproductive and unacceptable. However, Gandhi was not uncompromising in his rejection of large-scale, capital-intensive industrial enterprises. Modern-sector industrial development, in Gandhi's view, should supplement and reinforce the development of small-scale industries and agriculture in the hinterland.

The rationale was that with appropriate technology the chances of its acceptance by those for whom it was intended would be greatly improved.

For SNS to be used in convivial ways, I contend we need to exert healthy and frequent doses of “digital discipline.”

Boas’s own work emphasized studies of individual cultures, each based on its unique history. He held that the anthropologist’s primary assignment was to describe the particular characteristics of a given culture with a view toward reconstructing the historical events that led to its present structure. Implicit in this approach was the notion that resolving hypotheses regarding evolutionary development and the influence of one culture on another should be secondary to the careful and exhaustive study of particular societies.

cultural symbols and how those symbols can be used to better understanding a particular society

man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning".[1]

a thick description of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider.