23 - 002 Theory - Thinking about Technology

The human body has its limitations. It has limited strength, sensory range and poor memory. It is limited in what it can do but it has a mind that can imagine, desire and plan achievements both within the body’s capability and significantly beyond its capabilities. This difference between what the body and the mind can achieve and what the mind can envision they could achieve is how creative technological thinking is triggered. This thinking may be undertaken in a slow prolonged calculated way resulting in an outcome or the outcome can be achieved in a sudden eureka moment of inspiration. Think of the screw and the screwdriver that gives the turning torque necessary to rotate the screw into a hard substance. Then think of an electric motor built into the screwdriver that rotates the screw. The creative thinking had invented the screw and the screwdriver then the manual use of these with the revolution in the creation of battery driven electric motors had created the idea to have electric screwdrivers. The screw and the screwdriver were created in the First Industrial Revolution and the portable electric screwdriver in the Third Industrial Revolution. Then we have the move towards where things are not screwed together at all but glued together then finally to where things are built as a whole and not assembled so we have the evolution of additive manufacturing where everything is printed in one piece. This is Smart Manufacturing as defined in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Technology is the creation of tools in support of our human endeavours. Through the use of these tools we give our ideas the opportunity to take on real physical form. We bring them into the world. Technology has many similarities with art. Something within the mind is turned into a physical reality. Be it a screwdriver, painting or sculpture. But in both technology and art the human has to be driven by mental forces to want to do them. The desire for expression and the desire to fulfil a need. Those with creative minds are able to imagine what does not exist and to visualise these missing pieces. To work the mind through the use of imaginary objects to achieve imaginary outcomes. In the creation of tools then the skills necessary to effectively use these tools has to be developed by the user.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1945 masterpiece Phenomenology of Perception wrote “The body is our general means of having a world.” Our physical makeup with the fact we walk upright on two legs at a certain height, that we have a pair of hands with opposable thumbs, that we have eyes which see in a particular way, that we have certain tolerance for heat and cold all determines our perception of the world in a way that defines our conscious thoughts of the world. It then follows that whenever we gain new capabilities often through technology we not only change our bodily capabilities both mental and physical we also change our perception of the world around us.”

Consider the words of Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, that cannot be improved upon nor should they be plagiarised so I quote them below directly from his blog entry on www.roughtype.com . It manages to convey the feeling that adversity generates often resulting in the undertaking of boring repetitive tasks that can surprisingly be the source of creative thinking.

It’s from one of Robert Frost’s earliest and best poems, a sonnet called “Mowing.” He wrote it just after the turn of the twentieth century, when he was a young man, in his twenties, with a young family. He was working as a farmer, raising chickens and tending a few apple trees on a small plot of land his grandfather had bought for him in Derry, New Hampshire. It was a difficult time in his life. He had little money and few prospects. He had dropped out of two colleges, Dartmouth and Harvard, without earning a degree. He had been unsuccessful in a succession of petty jobs. He was sickly. He had nightmares. His firstborn child, a son, had died of cholera at the age of three. His marriage was troubled. “Life was peremptory,” Frost would later recall, “and threw me into confusion.”

But it was during those lonely years in Derry that he came into his own as a writer and an artist. Something about farming—the long, repetitive days, the solitary work, the closeness to nature’s beauty and carelessness—inspired him. The burden of labour eased the burden of life. “If I feel timeless and immortal it is from having lost track of time for five or six years there,” he would write of his stay in Derry. “We gave up winding clocks. Our ideas got untimely from not taking newspapers for a long period. It couldn’t have been more perfect if we had planned it or foreseen what we were getting into.” In the breaks between chores on the farm, Frost somehow managed to write most of the poems for his first book, A Boy’s Will; about half the poems for his second book, North of Boston; and a good number of other poems that would find their way into subsequent volumes. “Mowing,” from A Boy’s Will, was the greatest of his Derry lyrics. It was the poem in which he found his distinctive voice: plainspoken and conversational, but also sly and dissembling. (To really understand Frost—to really understand anything, including yourself—requires as much mistrust as trust.) As with many of his best works, “Mowing” has an enigmatic, almost hallucinatory quality that belies the simple and homely picture it paints—in this case of a man cutting a field of grass for hay.

 

“Technology, by enabling us to act in ways that go beyond our bodily limits, also alters our perception of the world and what the world signifies to us. Technology’s transformative power is most apparent in tools of discovery, from the microscope and the particle accelerator of the scientist to the canoe and the spaceship of the explorer, but the power is there in all tools, including the ones we use in our everyday lives. Whenever an instrument allows us to cultivate a new talent, the world becomes a different and more intriguing place, a setting of even greater opportunity. To the possibilities of nature are added the possibilities of culture. “Sometimes,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “the signification aimed at cannot be reached by the natural means of the body. We must, then, construct an instrument, and the body projects a cultural world around itself.” The value of a well-made and well-used tool lies not only in what it produces for us but what it produces in us. At its best, technology opens fresh ground. It gives us a world that is at once more understandable to our senses and better suited to our intentions—a world in which we’re more at home. Used thoughtfully and with skill, a tool becomes much more than a means of production or consumption. It becomes a means of experience. It gives us more ways to lead rich and engaged lives.”