Design that Matters (DtM)

Design that Matters (DtM), a 501c3 nonprofit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, creates new products that allow social enterprises in developing countries to offer improved services and scale more quickly. DtM has built a collaborative design process through which hundreds of volunteers in academia and industry donate their skills and expertise to the creation of breakthrough products for communities in need. Our goal is to deliver a better quality of service, and a better quality of life, to one million beneficiaries through products designed for our clients by 2012. (Link here)

GOOD: Kinkajou Projector

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Manual do Arquitecto Descalço

Technology in World Civilization

A Thousand-Year History
Arnold Pacey

Most general histories of technology are Eurocentrist, focusing on a main line of Western technology that stretches from the Greeks is through the computer. In this very different book, Arnold Pacey takes a global view, placing the development of technology squarely in a "world civilization." He portrays the process as a complex dialectic by which inventions borrowed from one culture are adopted to suit another.

Arnold Pacey is a physicist turned historian whose publications have contributed to the British appropriate-technology movement. He has written widely on science, technology, and agriculture. His previous books include The Maze of Ingenuity and The Culture of Technology.

About the Author

Arnold Pacey is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, Britain. He is the author of The Culture of Technology (MIT Press, 1983), Technology and World Civilization (MIT Press, 1991), and The Maze of Ingenuity, second edition (MIT Press, 1992).

A Hammer in Their Hands

A Documentary History of Technology and the African-American Experience
Edited by Carroll W. Pursell

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

Scholars working at the intersection of African-American history and the history of technology are redefining the idea of technology to include the work of the skilled artisan and the ingenuity of the self-taught inventor. Although denied access through most of American history to many new technologies and to the privileged education of the engineer, African-Americans have been engaged with a range of technologies, as makers and as users, since the colonial era. A Hammer in Their Hands (the title comes from the famous song about John Henry, "the steel-driving man" who beat the steam drill) collects newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements for runaway slaves, letters, folklore, excerpts from biography and fiction, legal patents, protest pamphlets, and other primary sources to document the technological achievements of African-Americans.

Included in this rich and varied collection are a letter from Cotton Mather describing an early method of smallpox inoculation brought from Africa by a slave; selections from Frederick Douglass's autobiography and Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Confederate Patent Act, which barred slaves from holding patents; articles from 1904 by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, debating the issue of industrial education for African-Americans; a 1924 article from Negro World, "Automobiles and Jim Crow Regulations"; a photograph of an all-black World War II combat squadron; and a 1998 presidential executive order on environmental justice. A Hammer in Their Hands and its companion volume of essays, Technology and the African-American Experience (MIT Press, 2004) will be essential references in an emerging area of study.

Published in cooperation with the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution

About the Editor

Carroll Pursell is Adjunct Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University, Australia.

The Culture of Technology - Arnold Pacey

The Culture of Technology examines our often conflicting attitudes toward nuclear weapons, biological technologies, pollution, Third World development, automation, social medicine, and industrial decline. It disputes the common idea that technology is "value-free" and shows that its development and use are conditioned by many factors-political and cultural as well as economic and scientific. Many examples from a variety of cultures are presented. These range from the impact of snowmobiles in North America to the use of water pumps in rural India, and from homemade toys in Africa to electricity generation in Britain-all showing how the complex interaction of many influences in every community affects technological practice.

Arnold Pacey, who lives near Oxford, England, has a degree in physics and has lectured on both the history of technology and technology policy, with a particular focus on the development of technologies appropriate to Third World needs. He is the author of The Maze of Ingenuity (MIT Press paperback).

About the Author

Arnold Pacey is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, Britain. He is the author of The Culture of Technology (MIT Press, 1983), Technology and World Civilization (MIT Press, 1991), and The Maze of Ingenuity, second edition (MIT Press, 1992).

Appropriate Technology

Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology (EDAT)

A new type of engineering degree course, entitled Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology (EDAT), at the University of Warwick, is described. After explaining the term 'appropriate technology' and its relationship to 'alternative and intermediate technology', the need for a new approach to teaching engineering design is developed. The reasons why present engineering undergraduates receive an education ill-suited to work in appropriate technology are examined. Implicit assumptions underlying all the teaching are claimed to produce graduates unfitted for work in many important fields, such as small firms, job creation, and overseas development. A new set of assumptions to underlie the teaching of appropriate technology are put forward and the resulting implications for the engineering design curriculum are examined. The development of the EDAT course is then described, and finally the course structure and teaching methods are outlined.
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Why Appropriate Technology?

Appropriate Technology has a bias towards technology choice, as it relates to detailed design (for example, sizing a machine component) up to technology policy (for example, national implementation of the Rio Conference's Agenda 21). It explores two particular themes within technology choice, namely sustainability and world development.

The taught modules include coverage of the sources and conservation of water and energy, intermediate technologies for rural development abroad and technology policy. For students with a particular interest in overseas development there is also access to modules taught by the University's Economics and Politics departments.

Sustainability is taken as having many meanings including stewardship of natural resources, fairness to future generations and economic viability without long-term subsidy. World development is interpreted here as the use of technology to narrow the rapidly widening material gap between rich and poor countries. Both sustainability and development are multi-disciplinary issues: although the Appropriate Technology elective approaches them via engineering, it travels a little way into their wider social and political settings.

Some students use the elective as a formal training in mechanical engineering which uses some unusual or interesting illustrations; whilst others take it because they have some ideological commitment to sustainability or to world development and hope to pursue an engineering career in pursuit of those ideals.

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Portable solar-powered refrigerator

21-year-old student/inventor/entrepreneur Emily Cummins has designed a brilliant portable solar-powered refrigerator that works based upon the principle of evaporation. Employing a combination of conduction and convection, the refrigerator requires no electricity and can be made from commonly available materials like cardboard, sand, and recycled metal.
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Simply place perishable foods or temperature-sensitive medications in the solar refrigerator’s interior metal chamber and seal it. In-between the inner and outer chamber, organic material like sand, wool or soil is then saturated with water. As the sun warms the organic material, water evaporates, reducing the temperature of the inner chamber to a cool, 6 ºC [43 ºF] for days at a time! (ver aqui)

After winning £5,000 from York Merchant Adventurers for her idea, Emily delayed going to college for a year to take her refrigerator to Africa for further development.
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At 16 Emily won a regional Young Engineer for Britain Award for creating a toothpaste squeezer for people with arthritis, and the next year went on to win a Sustainable Design Award for a water-carrier made from wood and rubber tubing. In 2007 Emily was named the British Female Innovator of the Year, and last year was short-listed for Cosmopolitan’s 2008 Ultimate Women of the Year Competition.

Technology, Humans, and Society

A number of factors, from soaring fuel prices to genetically modified agricultural products, have greatly refocused worldwide attention on the interrelationship between technology and society and the necessity for sustainable engineering and business practices. Technology, Humans, and Society focuses on building a model for business and engineering that will lead to a sustainable world. The challenge for engineering is to develop new technologies that enable economic growth and do not deplete irreplaceable resources and destroy ecological systems.

No longer solely the domain of environmentalists and ecologists, "sustainable" or "green" business practices and engineering designs are becoming a central part of the planning of many of the world's most influential companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Dow, and Agilent. Companies are overwhelmingly not only finding that sustainable business and engineering practices are good for environment, but also improve the image of the company and quite frequently the "bottom-line."

Dorf's 1975 publication, Technology and Society (ISBN: 0878350470), sold over 70,000 copies. The completely new Technology, Humans, and Society is created to meet the swelling demand for unified practices of both business people and technologists in the creation of a "greener" sustainable world

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Appropriate, or intermediate, technology

Appropriate, or intermediate, technology is a broad based term referring to technologies that can be produced and maintained by small communities. Most often it refers to technologies that attempt to keep in balance local natural resources while serving basic infrastructure needs such as water, electricity, cook fuel, heat, sanitation, and housing. Most appropriate technology discussions revolve around the understanding that much of the benefit of quality infrastructure can be gained without harming the environment, without using complex hard to manufacture systems, and without requiring the prohibitive level of financing needed for large infrastructure projects. With the proper tools and knowledge communities of limited means, often in very simple and elegant ways, can solve on their own problems which the industrialized world has relegated to expensive specialists.

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FIELD GUIDE TO APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY

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Edited By
Barrett Hazeltine, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A.
Christopher Bull, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A.

This book is an all-in-one "hands-on guide" for nontechnical and technical people working in less developed communities. It has been developed and designed with a prestigious team of authors, each of whom has worked extensively in developing societies throughout the world. This field guide includes: – Step-by-step instructions and illustrations showing how to build and maintain a vast array of appropriate technology systems and devices – Unique coverage on healthcare, basic business and project management, principles of design, promotion, scheduling, training, microlending, and more Teachers, doctors, construction workers, forest and agricultural specialists, scientists and healthcare workers, and religious and government representatives will find this book a first source for advice.