Sustainable society:wellbeing and technology - 3 case studies in decision making

Throughout history, technology has provided many and significant improvements to the way we live, but the current pace of development now often exceeds the ability for the full potential of any technological innovation to be explored and implemented before further innovations are introduced. This pace of change results both in missed opportunities for a technology in its ability to contribute to effective solutions in addressing issues such as reducing adverse environmental impact or improving the health of society. In considering the nature of technological innovation and development, the associated engineering design processes can themselves be characterized as being associated with a highly complex, iterative problem-solving exercises, involving the integration and synthesis of a wide range of technologies. This in turn requires the design team to manage trade-offs across a range of primary constraints, as for instance embodied energy in manufacturing, energy consumption in use, capital costs and operating and resource recovery costs. Further investigation into the complexity of societal issues and means for achieving a more effective and fuller utilization of both existing resources and technologies is necessary to place sustainability as a priority of the decision making process. To support discussion and provide context, three case studies are presented. The first case study examines a strategic framework adopting metrics aligned with environmental issues used as proxies for evaluating wellbeing and common good. The second case study examines the specific contribution of eHealth to wellbeing and the balance of technological, societal and political issues in determining outcomes. The third case study considers how technology might be embedded as part of the process of obtaining meta-data from within a small rural community to demonstrate the impact of mitigation strategies associated with the reduction of its carbon footprint, and hence on climate change. In doing so, the paper seeks to bring together issues surrounding environmental problems in relation to a technology driven engineering design process while positioning them in the context of social benefits arising from sustainable decision making.</p

Making a third place : the science and the poetry of husbandry

It locally contains or heaven, or hell; There’s no third place in’t. (Webster 1993) Husbandry in its original sense is a ‘being together’, based on dwelling in a particular place. There is an intricate connection between modern science and industrialised agriculture, both of which developed on the basis of particular values associated with Good Husbandry – those which focused on individual innovation, profit-related productivity, quantitative measurement, objective, ‘puritan’ truth and control of nature. Ideals of the earth as a ‘commonwealth’, and of traditional stewardship, were down-played. The writings of Francis Bacon provide an example of a positivist, pioneering attitude which has continued to underpin modern science. In retrospect, however, these ideals sound rather one-sided. Nature herself is not well represented in the modern science relationship. In this thesis, Virgil’s Georgics and Lucretius’ de rerum natura are used to derive a poetics of Being and of Husbandry, which applies not only to the world of poetry, but to events which underlie scientific research. Virgil’s use of verbs verifies that life’s activities are shared by all living things. Lucretius asserts that even inanimate atoms both exist in themselves and are creative. ‘To be’ can be visualised as a dynamic, balancing act between striving to stay in being and longing to engage creatively with another. The basis of this thesis is that a shaping of research towards good husbandry involves a fair relationship with nature, which in turn involves the acknowledgement in writing that nature is active, dynamic and a good collaborator. Husbandry defined as a continually unfolding third place between extremes or between self and other – this holistic, concentric definition – applies at all scales, all levels of experience. This work was derived from practice-led research involving the writing of poetry and therefore the findings exist in parallel as a sequence of poems.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo