I love making tools and devices. Technologies such as cars, engines, electronics, science instruments or even, I shall admit, attack/defense technologies like guns, fighter aircrafts, ships, etc entice me. There seems to be an innocent joy on seeing and relating to how these machines work, unrelated to the political and social contexts where these are used/misused. The movements of the parts, their relationship with each other, technicalities of design, materials used, challenges to be solved within given resources, the histories and stories of evolution and uses, etc., all these make me glue in to the subject. My own journey as a maker has similar acts of learning new tools, designing within constraints, troubleshooting, struggling with materials and their properties, thinking about the end-use situations, identifying right machining methods and so on. As a maker the world is full of very interesting toys, one could happily get lost in. Except perhaps when one opens one’s senses to the real wide world.

While I love being a hardcore technical maker, I am also a sensitive human being, with feelings and emotions, living and absorbing signals from a complicated and dynamic society around myself. Environmental crisis, class divide, hate, unfair distribution of resources and power, insult and oppression of the unfortunate by the fortunate, the examples just go on and on. I can’t stop noticing them, not being affected by them, not asking myself how am I, with my relatively immense privileges, adding to the tragedy. It makes me deeply divided in conflict. And to discover that so much of technology is directly involved in increasing the unfairness in the society and cause environmental destruction, is a real tragedy. For many years I have had this struggle, and it still continues. I am only beginning to ask deeper and better questions to myself. I have changed my profession a few times in an attempt to find a place where I could practice my love of making while also behaving as a conscientious designer. And I know that many fellow technologists do not have this privilege, or worse, do not wish to acknowledge and practice this privilege.

My main conflicts with modern industrial technology lies in the following observations:

1. 90% of the population are poor, and can’t afford basic technologies for basic quality of life. Remaining 10% live a highly affluent life, causing immense social stress, environmental destruction, and inequality. Technological divide is significantly observable in these 2 broad classes.
2. Much of the technology in use, is of exotic nature. It costs a lot to make (environmental costs + economic costs + social costs), creates a lot of byproduct pollution, after use it itself contributes to human waste pollution, perpetuates direct inequality in the society.
3. Much of the technology disconnects us from our surroundings, be it escape via entertainment and social media, to escaping waste by dumping it elsewhere out of sight and senses. Often technology helps us work from a clean home while ordering environmental destruction elsewhere.
4. Technology causes subduing of senses and their connection with the world. Each sense, especially audio, vision and tactile interacts increasingly with technology, rather than the real world. We have earbuds in our ears, and even when without them, we are drowned by industrial noises, traffic, firecrackers, speakers, etc. We see through glasses of windows and high rise buildings, and more so via the digital interface. Our vision field is full of selected and curated technical objects like in a home or office environment or viewing the outside world from the safe confines of a moving car. Our minds have been bombarded with advertisements.
5. Each new technology adds another convenience and comfort and each convenience distances us from the raw nature. As we know in ecology, any species requires a natural check and context to survive and survive sustainably. With technology we remove ourselves from nature, thereby avoiding any natural checks and any co-existential dependence on other species. On those species on which we depend, like dairy industry or agriculture, we have converted them into non-natural forms, more resembling industrial production units than naturally occurring species.

But since all of these are lofty concerns, I would rather like to focus on the makers of technology, my tribe and my territory.

Technology is often portrayed as being unbiased and neutral. It is argued that technology is designed while not worrying about who uses it, how and to what end. An aloofness of the maker is imbibed as the dominant technological culture of our times. A similar argument is used by the proponents of personal guns in the US or the proponents of nuclear weapons or even the people working in a nation’s defense industry. The arguments put forward by corporations sell a similar story. They say we make technology to serve the interests of a market and if we don’t do so, how will we survive? They say the market buyers will have the moral duty of when, where and how to use the technology while the makers of technology need not be burdened with such lofty philosophical and political questions. In short, makers of the most powerful augmentation of the human experience conveniently insulate themselves of the consequences of what they make.

Many proponents of the “tech is neutral” school of thought may agree that the world of technology is costly, hence we need to make the economy better (trickle down school of thought), so that more market opens up and technology becomes accessible. When it comes to environmental crisis, the argument is that technology by itself didn’t cause it. It allowed for the greed of the human being to be expressed instead, which turned out the way it is now. If the environmental crisis has to be controlled, the people who use technology should learn better, take it on themselves to not pollute or abuse the ‘gifts’ of technology. One may also argue that tech is the only way we will get A) a good quality of life for all B) solution to the environmental crisis and C) all novelty that the future has a potential to hold. In all cases, the maker of the technology, the producer of it are conveniently let off on the responsibility of technology.

Makers of technology, like me, the ones who are nerdy enough to pick up engineering/science as a career, essentially work in a super-hierarchy, far removed from the end-user as well as the context of use of their technology. A big chain of administration, sales, marketing personnel, bankers, market researchers, market forces block the direct view between the maker and the user. This distance automatically makes it impossible to control how the tech will be used, thus implying a kind of systemic neutrality by default. The distance also has the consequence that the maker no longer can design with a relevant enough understanding of the end-user/context, thereby making it mandatory that the end-user/context has to adapt instead to the technology. Such an arrangement implies that most technologies are meant for a niche section of the population which meets an arbitrary but absolutely necessary criteria for access. Criteria could be listed as those having adequate economic surplus, education and training to use such technologies, capacity to adapt one’s ability towards a remotely designed often miss-fitting technology and an unmet need which the said technology promises to satisfy. These criteria are stringent and non-negotiable, and therefore by design, technology only reaches a small proportion of the population.

An example could be found in the domain of assistive technology where one person’s adaptability to technology is quite limited, in contrast to the mainstream neuro-typical and body-typical population. The scope of adaptability also varies between individuals, or even as the individual grows older. Such a diversity is therefore never catered to by the mass production philosophy of the industrial model, which solely functions on the assumption that any individual, however unique, will and can morph into a standard “average” stereotypical consumer. Those who need customization, well they either should have a lot of money, like the defense industry or just struggle with a low quality of life, example being the people with disabilities.

To my naive eyes, I see more than 90% of a population, be it in India or in the world, not having access to technology. Technology seems to be the reserve of the top few percents of the population, although the statistics and sophistication of technology certainly has many variations within this range.

My thoughts expressed here originate from a certain despair. I see most people who do not have the money to buy technology not have access to technology. I see technology producers only be concerned with the small niche of the human population. I see technology as the prime driver of bringing conveniences to people (who can afford it). These conveniences only increase the distance between the users and their environment. In ecology we study that the most sustainable species is one where there are multiple other spices which co-exist and balance each other. If the number of a species grows, then ecosystem balances itself by increase in predation. If a predator or food species is removed from the system, dependent species may either increase into too many and upset the balance or may just die off due to lack of food, respectively. In a similar way I think the human species needs the ecological counterparts to balance itself. But conveniences brought in by technology are the key reason for our unbalanced and unchecked existence. Each technology essentially takes us away from being vulnerable to the ecosystem in a good and healthy way. Our state of the world is nothing but a demonstration of what disconnection looks like in reality. Technology makes us the evil gods, we destroy each other, and we destroy the ecosystem.

Who makes technology? People like me, makers who are good in the making of machines, who are perpetually fascinated by them. Who pays us? As you may know, the making of technology, its design, its various prototyping stages is an intensely resource intensive process. It takes a lot of time, lot of materials, a lot of testing, and a lot of failures to make a new technological change which may or may not lead to an ‘innovation’. No wonder it is amazingly costly to do hardware engineering. Having produced and failed multiple times in many such projects, I now can vouch for what I say – that its not easy to make hardware. But we makers are not in this game to find ease, is it? We love the technical challenges and get kicks out of them. And to keep this bunch of hardware nerds (like myself) going as well as the flow of materials and prototypes, there have to be significant economic resources to fund such experiments. Who pays for innovation in the hardware world? The government to some extent and mostly the private companies who see some future profits. Common people can’t fund hardware R&D, in the way it is known. All the people involved in these powerful places, have higher ups who they wish to impress, so that they can “survive” and grow. These higher ups have more higher ups, and the chain continues. By the time this impression chain reaches the top of the mountain, its far from the people it wants to serve. The sea of the willing, imagined people, is all they can look from the top, people those who can easily be clubbed as an average consumer. In terms of the government, this chain ends into political leaderships who are always deeply concerned about their own ‘survival’ in terms of votes and popularity. Both the bulk mass market and mass votes visionaries are similar in 1 aspect. They consider a small but powerful and noisy faction of the population as the whole “world”, it becomes their ‘bubble’. They also think in averages, and in large numbers. “Scale-up” is the business buzz word! As one operates away and distant from the people for whom one designs, the language used changes. Needs of the people, expressed in a nuanced and subtle language get trumped by popular buzz words which could be sold to the niche world. This niche crowd are also those people who were born into privileged societies, having access to parental exposure to technology and fashion trends. They are also less affected by local factors such geographic locations, local cultures, local climate and environments. In effect they are a completely disconnected, a different sub-species of the human population, only remotely related to the people expressing grave unmet needs. Yet, it is exactly these elite classes who have the capacity to pay and popularize a tech, irrespective of who needs it. The neglect of small communities with diverse sub-cultures, diverse languages, diverse needs, lack of economic resources thus becomes profound. The subsection of the human population with most critical needs (therefore implying non-adaptability) who are obviously without money and without politically relevant and consistent voice are no more the target audience of tech makers and promoters. Diversity is bad for either the politicians or the corporations, thus the need to standardize the population. Our educational system is a prime example of the “averaging” process to produce close to stereotypical consumers and voters.

My realizations may not hold true for other keen observers of the society, yet this is my experience. In my own work I try to navigate through this jigsaw of moral dilemmas and the joys and turbulence of making technology. My current idea of ‘good’ tech is one where the developer is in close proximity to the end-user, where the development and consumption of tech co-exist within an environmentally vulnerable ecosystem. I stress vulnerability here! This essentially implies smallness. The opensource movements, the citizen science movements, ideas and thoughts of various scientists, engineers, teachers and fellow makers help me articulate this, help me dance in hope of finding this dynamic sweet spot within the tech spectrum. Being a small developer allows me to have small overheads, and thus a small development fee structure affordable to the common people or NGOs. It also forces me to not be disconnected from the local circumstances, local cultures, local dreams of my end-users. As a cautionary note, what I am expressing here is still a dream in progress and I flicker about this central theme. My comfort/conveniences are pricey as compared to the people I wish to serve (being so privileged and all), and so is my social status. Both are in a state of hand-to-mouth existence often, which is a struggle at times. But I feel immensely lucky to have come across some teachers and practitioners, who are themselves in search of the sweet-spot. And no, these few folks are definitely not to be found in the elite (read elite-loving) tech organizations of the country like the IITs or the various government labs and tech-hubs. However, its sad to be locally alone and not being able to find day-to-day collaborators in this space. I am often surprised why so many bright minds can be seen pursuing often silly, artificially generated and sterile problems of the rich (particularly the defense, space tech, IT, bio industries), while the real and interesting challenges lay open for exploration in the places where a diverse population lives.

There is an old story of relevance here. A police officer finds a man frantically searching for something under a streetlight in the middle of a dark night. Worried, he asks, “Hey! What have you lost?”. The man says, “I’v lost my keys”. Policeman “Where did you see them last?”. Man, “In the alley over there”, pointing a finger to a dark unlit building far off on the other side of the road. Baffled, the policeman asks ” Then why the hell are you searching for it here?”. The man: “Its bright in here, I can see”. One does what one finds easy, and not necessarily what is right or necessary, it seems. This is the dilemma of us technologists.

[ Some thoughts on the nature and context of designers of technology and how it influences the outcomes. It is based on personal experience/observations as well as readings of Mathew E. Crawford’s ‘Shop Class as Soul Craft‘, Richard Sennett’s ‘The craftsman‘, Pankaj Sekhsaria‘s research and writings on this topic and more recently Manu Prakash‘s lectures, discussions and the idea of a frugal sciences community within his ‘Frugal Science‘ course. ]

The question is who are the designers of technological solutions? Are they the ones who are passionate about technology and would like to make new technology for the sake if it? Or are they the ones who face the problems and yearn for a solution to the problems through technology and ultimately build a stop-gap solution?

I wish i could ask every designer : Is tech an end in itself or just a means to an end?

I think it is the chronic-designers who form the bulk of people behind new technology. I am also one of them, i love to make/think tech because it is fun and engrossing. But there are some pockets where the people who face the problems are the technology developers. These first-hand responders to crisis or problems are often found in resource-constrained environments such as rural areas where the professional designers don’t dare venture due to lack of incentives (salary, quality of work environment, glamour, etc). Often known as jugaad or bricolage in different parts of the world (there may be words for this in all languages), these technologies have a different character than those designed by professionals.

The professionals are characterized by ‘working for others in return for monetary and allied incentives’. People here are the engineers, the designers, the scientists and others housed in corporate organizations, universities and also NGOs.

Characteristics:

1. These people’s lives are not as directly affected by the problems, and that is the distinguishing feature.
2. Surrounded by high resources of money, knowledge, internet, machines, software tools (simulation, etc), etc.
3. Living remote from the problem situations.
4. Often working on multiple problems unrelated to each other.
5. Working full time on technology design.
6. Highly trained in the domains.
7. Working in teams with varying expertise.

Pros

1. Remote perspective helps in isolating the problem from distracting issues arising from the context or environment of the problem.
2. High availability of resource allows for efficient problem solving, up to date with latest technologies and scientific understandings.
3. Availability of peer community world wide, thanks to the internet, helps in shortening the learning curve, sharing of experiences and brainstorming.
4. Working in a comfortable environment, with assured salaries and a mind free to give quality focus on the problem at hand – tremendously impacts the sustenance of the research interest and thus result in more chances of breakthrough.
5. Sustained research practice over the years of funding and comfortable life makes the researcher well trained in handling a multitude of problems, a versatile hand.
6. Availability of other’s expertise on hand allows for large teams to work together on isolated problems, thereby multiplying the chances of success and reducing the time required to achieve that.

However, there are problems. Often in India, politicians have a tendency to hover about problems and pick and choose those which will result in them getting voted to power. These are called in local terms – helicopter politicians. Also because they use helicopters to bypass the tough lanes and long laborious ground travels. In our discussion here, i use the same analogy. These helicopter engineers/scientists/designers and their helicopter ways of organizing and working, do bring along some problems of their own:

Cons

1. First, members of this group are not directly impacted by the problem faced. This, while being beneficial for allowing cold rationality to rule within the minds of the researchers, often misses the lived experiences and the richness (or poverty) surrounding the problem.
2. In real life, problems never exist in isolation. Multiple problems are at play at the same time – spanning social, technical, emotional, personal spaces and so on. Solving in one domain is often at the cost of the other domains. Could i share a joke here? Engineers can easily be the ones who effectively replace (solve?) 1 problem with many. Ha ha.
3. When one is remote from the problem at hand, the quantity and quality of observations round the context of the problem is very limited. This often may result in a misinterpreted problem. And this could also lead to suggesting solutions far more complicated and adversely impacting the end-user environment.
4. If one is trained in using specific tools, one tends to do all the thinking based on those tools only. This tools bias may lead to solutions ill suited or over-engineered. An example could be a part designed and made using sophisticated CNC machines, costly metal and so on, but then used in a dusty, humid, remote rural setting leading to rusting and damages. This leads to heavy maintenance and eventual dis-use of the part due to added costs and complications and breakdown times. Such is still a successful example. Another worse example could be the designer’s bias to use a certain workflow, CAD simulations for example, which hog immense time and resources while other frugal solutions remain unexplored.
5. Due to the remote location of the designers, in geography as well as in the hearts and minds, a very narrow problem is attempted to being solved. The tools used are sophisticated and require trained manpower. All this leads to solutions which may not be easily customizable by the end user to meet the always existing diversity of local situations. Or even for maintenance sake. The end-user is relegated to the dumb role of a passive consumer.
6. Problems in reality are never static and change with time and conditions and cultures. But can solutions, as designed by the helicopter designers/organizations adapt to such changes? Even if the end users have the money to fund new product development, this is an overall inefficient process.
7. Just to reiterate #5, the rigid structure of an optimized resource hungry design chain, works against change. It is not agile. What kind of impact this lethargic system may be having on human society is a worthy issue to research into.
8. When the designer/engineer/scientists are done, and the corporations move on to greener pastures, the usual maintenance requiring machinery or technology stops functioning. It lays waste. The end-user community is not as upgraded or embodied of the technology to make/modify it. The knowledgebase, being remote and inaccessible (due to different literacy, skills, funds, etc) is no longer an integral part of the local community. It is not their property.
9. Most importantly, when the designer has a limited, distant and incentive driven concern about a problem, whether the problem gets solved in reality is of no consequence to her/him. It’s real solving is not critical to the daily life or future of the designer/engineer. Just a set back probably in terms of some incentives. Going beyond professional bounds is not mandatory. Even the professional targets are limited by the profit and survival of the organization that the designer is a part of. So in summary, one works only as long as one gets profitable returns form the work. Commitment is measured against profits. Un-profitable commitment is shunned in modern consumer culture as silly and stupid.

The first-hand responder

The jugaad designer, jugaadu, as often called in India is a different beast. It makes its way through a world very different from that of the professional helicopter designer.

Characteristics

1. Lack of resources, often meaning lack of surplus capital, lack of tools, lack of workshop space, etc.
2. Lack of training in design/engineering/science. This implies it is mostly an experientially learned knowledge space and less of from books and such.
3. Sources of learning are often limited to observations of what works and frugal experimentation.
4. Surrounded by a rich set of interconnected, complicated problems.

Pros

1. Situatedness next to the problem educates the designer of the many complexities of the problem.
2. It also helps to know and strive for frugal local solutions.
3. Limited resources could also provide meaningful constraints and force generation of locally sustainable solutions.
4. Since the designer is part of the local folk, her/his interventions also become part of the local culture. This has the advantage of being passed on to other practitioners. So, thanks to the local designer, the community upgrades itself with better tools/tricks to surmount a problem.
5. Such work allows alternative modes of dignified and respected employment and entrepreneurship.
6. If the same problem is occuring across a region, it may spawn various local solutions and thus provides a diverse and active repository of solutions to choose from. Often the most effective one would eventually be selected. This is akin to the linux development world.
7. Because the designer is accessible and known through the community, customizations are possible – a great boon to the diversity of the land and its people.

Cons

1. Being right in the hot zone often could be overwhelming. Problems may affect social conditions and emotional states. Such a problem environment could dissuade or drive away potential designers from attempting solutions.
2. Lack of resources may hamper development and testing of ideas, thuse slowing down the process. A slow design process also takes its toll on motivation of the designers – a super important resource.
3. Lack of a peer group or access to experts could limit any progress.
4. Often such a work may be done by lone individuals or a small group of local friends. This size probably directly correlates to selection of simpler problems which are eventually successfully solved.
5. Solutions created are highly customized to the local problem and thus not generally replicable.
6. They require a mix of art, artisanship and engineering to get working. It could be difficult for the layman to operate the solutions, even if not make it. This mandates the need of a steep learning curve, without an instruction manual!
7. Often the solutions are fidgety, and breakdowns are common. This is because lack of resources and robust engineering knowledge force weak engineering into the solutions.
8. Solutions being hand made suffer from crudeness and lack of finish.
9. If the designer is lost or migrates, and if the valuable skills have not been passed through, the whole solutions falls flat.
10. Since the skills are based fundamentally on experience, experimentation, of the trial and error type and so on, they are hard to acquire. Sustained training is necessary for such work, equivalent to artisanal work. The embodied knowledge is almost difficult to transmit in softer forms such as through books or the internet.

Is there a mid-way?

The spectrum of designers seems so crucial to an understanding of how technology is created and disseminated. I guess all kinds of designers are necessary and have been operating since a long time. Maybe, before the industrial revolution and mass consumerism era (about 200 years), much of the world would run on artisan developed technology, where almost everyone was a maker/innovator. And maybe in the modern times we humans have segregated ourselves too much, outsourcing our basic functions of making and improving tools (as per Mathew Crawford – the human agency ) to focused subsections of humanity. All, in return for convenience and the idea of mechanistic and organizational efficiency (a great critical analysis of this aspect of us can be found in Jacques Ellul’s fantastic book – ‘The technological Society‘ ).

I came across documented evidence of the ‘mid-way’ through Pankaj Sekhsaria’s research, published as a book titled: ‘Instrumental Lives – an intimate biography of an Indian Laboratory‘. Here he discusses some cases of fund-starves Indian scientists pioneering unique frugal designs of advanced high-tech and super accuracy scientific instruments such as the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM) and so on. And they did good. More recently, a beautiful article was shared on the Frugal Sciences community which elaborated many of the issues and hopes discussed above, where scientists working in low-resource environments kind of bridge the spectrum between the professional helicopter designers and the first-responder kind of designers.

So, yes, there is the mid way! One can use the knowledge and skills and pros of both the worlds and make do for the cons. We could make wonderful technology which could make or break the critical unsolved issues found in the un-glamorous low-resource reality of our world (99% of our world?).