Investigating Past To See Technology’s Future – Notice Today Web

The university Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) fresh designed and hosted a two-day symposium, The History of Technology: Past, Present, and Future.

The symposium was held June 7-8 at MIT’s Wong Auditorium, and featured scholars from a difference of institutions with skillfulness in the story of technology. Each presented their ideas most the crossing of science, technology, and society, the field’s needs, and opportunities for its forthcoming development.

“We’re entertained to wage a scene in which these kinds of conversations crapper occur,” said Deborah Fitzgerald, STS information nous and past dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

The symposium unsealed with welcoming remarks from interpreter and university Professor Merritt Roe Smith. interpreter and adventurer are both Leverett Howell and William King Cutten Professors of the History of Technology at MIT.

“These kinds of gatherings – of older friends and colleagues and individual generations of students – create newborn opportunities to front scholarship, create connections, and ready abreast of what’s event in the field,” adventurer said. “Seeing the forthcoming finished the lense of our mutual pasts adds an essential appearance on underway innovations.”

More than 20 scholars prefabricated presentations during the symposium. The topics and speakers included:

• David Lucsko PhD ’05, academic of story at Auburn University: “How Things Work and Why It Matters – or, Why Poring over Automotive Wiring Diagrams from the 1970s Isn’t Actually a Colossal Waste of Time;”
• Dave Unger, an autarkical open historian: “Tools for Imagining a Better World: Social Technology, Organizational Dark Matter, and Reading for Difference;”
• Gregory Clancey, assort academic at the National University of Singapore: “The History of Technology in an Age of Mass Extinction;” and
• Ruth Schwartz Cowan, academic emerita at the University of Pennsylvania: “Does the History of Technology hit a Paradigm?”