It has been a long time since we updated our blog. This was partly our own fault but now we have some updates related to the proress and aim of our project.
Iniitialy we thought to conduct (literature) research about different traditional technologies and knowledge(TK) which could be combined to form a set of technologies applicable in highly urbanized areas, slums, megacities, etc. in order to empower the people to improve their living conditions with that technologies. However, in the process of research we dicovered that our initial definition about TK was just too simple and didn’t cover many aspects related to that topic. We weren’t even aware that research in that area exist in order to find a more or less suitable definition of what traditional knowledge is.
Now that we know more about this very complex and interesting topic we decided that our aim to document TK is exactly what is often criticized. Documentation of TK is not wrong per se but depends on the people who document. Often these people are western scholars and scientists that just record a snapshot of a particular knowledge at a certain time, thus removing the knowledge from the environment it is existing.
Due to new understanding of TK we wrote a relative extensive literature review about TK and adjusted our project objectives. We still want to conduct literature research about different traditional technologies but want to apply our definition to the anlyzed technologies in order to find out to what extend a documentation of those technologies would render them unusable. In the course of our analysis we want create an (online) questionaire which could be used as guideline when deliberating about whether a certain TK could be applied in a project.
Our new definition of TK and the adjusted project objectives will be put online as soon as possible.