17 Facts About Appropriate technology

Appropriate technology is a movement encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, affordable by locals, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable, and locally autonomous.

Appropriate technology has been used to address issues in a wide range of fields.

Today appropriate technology is often developed using open source principles, which have led to open-source appropriate technology and thus many of the plans of the technology can be freely found on the Internet.

Appropriate technology is most commonly discussed in its relationship to economic development and as an alternative to technology transfer of more capital-intensive technology from industrialized nations to developing countries.

In developed countries, the appropriate technology movement grew out of the energy crisis of the 1970s and focuses mainly on environmental and sustainability issues.

Related searches

Today the idea is multifaceted; in some contexts, appropriate technology can be described as the simplest level of technology that can achieve the intended purpose, whereas in others, it can refer to engineering that takes adequate consideration of social and environmental ramifications.

Appropriate technology disagreed with the idea of technology that benefited a minority of people at the expense of the majority or that put people out of work to increase profit.

Between 1966 and 1975 the number of new appropriate technology organizations founded each year was three times greater than the previous nine years.

Appropriate technology frequently serves as an umbrella term for a variety names for this type of technology.

However, the general consensus is appropriate technology encompasses the ideas represented by the above list.

Furthermore, the use of one term over another in referring to an appropriate technology can indicate ideological bias or emphasis on particular economic or social variables.

Schumacher's initial concept of intermediate Appropriate technology was created as a critique of the currently prevailing development strategies which focused on maximizing aggregate economic growth through increases to overall measurements of a country's economy, such as gross domestic product.

In many countries, this influx of Appropriate technology had increased the overall economic capacity of the country.

The foreign Appropriate technology imports were only benefiting a small minority of urban elites.

Appropriate technology was meant to address four problems: extreme poverty, starvation, unemployment and urban migration.

Term appropriate technology is used in developed nations to describe the use of technology and engineering that result in less negative impacts on the environment and society, i e, technology should be both environmentally sustainable and socially appropriate.

Schumacher asserts that such Appropriate technology, described in the book Small Is Beautiful, tends to promote values such as health, beauty and permanence, in that order.