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The function and impact of innovation in both our personal and working lives is ever growing. Understanding how people shape innovation and how technology shapes people's interactions with each other and the natural world is necessary - not only for those who research study, develop and carry out brand-new innovations, but also for all those people and organisations that have to use those innovations in their working and personal lives.

Technology is not a neutral word. Different people will offer it various meaning depending on their viewpoint and context.

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

There are three important elements to this meaning:

1. Technology is about taking action to fulfill a human requirement instead of merely understanding the workings of the natural world, which is the objective of science. The invention of the microscope was driven by a need to check out the world of the small, beyond our unaided vision. This technological service to a long standing issue has in turn allowed us to understand more the functions of the world which in turn has actually resulted in the advancement of more technologies.

2. It uses a lot more than clinical understanding and includes values as much as realities, useful craft understanding as much as theoretical knowledge. The iPod is an example of where the physics of making a small device carry so much music is married with innovative design to make an iconic need to have accessory.

3. It involves organised ways of doing things. It covers the designated and unintentional interactions between products (makers, gadgets, artifacts) and individuals and systems who make them, utilize them or are affected by them through various procedures. Lots of people like to drink coffee, often in a coffee store. That coffee may have originated from trees which have actually been reproduced particularly for increased yields that support a little farmer and his household however that needs pesticides that were established and made in another nation. The gathered coffee beans will themselves be transported around the globe, to be processed and placed in plans which are dispersed to stores that then make the cup of coffee in a polystyrene cup that was produced for the function however which then needs to disposed of and so on. Every choice we make counts on, and feeds, a highly interdependent and far reaching lifestyle where some have much and some have little.

Technology is a hands-on, can-do occupation where people need to be skilled in a lot of the following: engineering, interacting, designing, developing, innovating, handling, production, modelling, and systems believing. But innovation also provides us various items which can be utilized for good or ill or where the benefits are contested and similarly the processes involved in producing and utilizing technology indicates that we should all take an interest in whether it provides us and everyone else with a sustainable future.

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