New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Political Alternative Technology
Appropriate technology
This is concerned with alternative ways of organizing society, the way people live, their patterns
of work, the structure of industry and how they are housed. It is also concerned with education,
health care and financial institutions. In many cases Political Alternative Technology is a rediscovery
of the relevance to the present day of movements from decades, or even centuries ago.
Thus Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops [5] first published in 1899, has been widely
quoted as containing the answer to many of the ills of present-day industrial society, and was
republished in 1974.
The scale of application here may vary widely also. Take for example the participation of
workers in the management of industry. We have, on the one hand, the participation of ‘worker
directors’ on the boards of directors of a large company which is in all other respects quite
conventional. On the other hand, there are large numbers of small worker-cooperatives being set
up in the United Kingdom in which the firm is entirely owned by the people working in it.
The formation of experimental communities for people to live and work in has been a reaction
against the anonymity of the large city with its accompanying waste. The degree to which such
communities share buildings, facilities and possessions varies widely, as does the scale of the
enterprise. This may vary from a number of people sharing an urban house, to the establishment
of a complete ‘co-operative village’ where most people live in their own houses but work parttime
in the village industries and part-time in growing food.
How these Interact
There are no firm boundaries to the above fields, and they wil frequently be combined. Thus
it is no accident that many of the small worker co-operatives in the United Kingdom are concerned
with retailing organically grown wholefoods. People living in communities are likely to be
engaged in recycling, organic techniques of food production, or generating their own power.
Techniques from the field of Environmental Alternative Technology such as improved simple
designs of windpumps have been applied successfully in the Intermediate Technology field, and
here many of the ideas of Political Alternative Technology are relevant also.
All the above spheres are embraced by the term Appropriate Technology, which includes also
conventional ‘high’ technology where that is appropriate. High technology is characterized by
complex expensive processes requiring a large capital outlay per person employed. The essence
of an Appropriate Technology is its fitness for local function, rather than for universal application,
and its appropriateness must be judged taking into account all the relevant factors, social
and environmental as well as technical.
Some things that Appropriate Technology is not: it is not a second-hand technology; only the
best is good enough. But in a given situation the best is probably not the most elaborate or
expensive, and it may be very simple and cheap. It is not necessarily easy or obvious, and wil
often call for more creative and inventive skill than the use of an inappropriate technology. It is
not a well defined discipline, but because some relevant factors will be non-technical, the judging
of appropriateness is essentially interdisciplinary in character.
Whilst any particular Appropriate Technology has an essentially local function, the concepts
underlying Appropriate Technology have universal application. We are now in a position to see
how these concepts can be brought into our teaching.
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