Appropriate technology

It’s the Christmas season, with shopping centers crammed with consumers, and corporations touting the latest releases just in time for the holidays: new books, new fashions, and new gadgets. While I love new gizmos and doohickeys, and I’m always happy to see what the latest technological developments can do (and to devise all sorts of diabolical new uses for things), I’m not always sure that the latest technological “wrinkles” in consumer goods are good. Sometimes designers take perfectly good solutions, and just “muck them up”. Perhaps it is time to examine our quest for the “latest thing” and really think about what makes a new technology, or technological approach, a good one.