Using a cultural evolution approach, we suggest that sudden changes in the organization of ITs depend on the high costs of maintaining and transmitting reliable information. The coexistence between gradual improvements and discontinuous technological change is a consequence of the asymmetric relationship between complexity and hardware and software.
#Transdata portable 1983 how to
The value of information systems experiences sudden changes (i) when we learn how to use this technology, (ii) when we accumulate a large amount of information, and (iii) when communities of practice create and exchange free information. Why does that happen? Is technological change continuous and gradual or does it occur in sudden leaps and bounds? The evolution of information technology (IT) allows for a quantitative and theoretical approach to technological transitions. Technological transitions correspond to times and places in the past when a large number of novel artefact forms or behaviours appeared together or in rapid succession.
#Transdata portable 1983 series
Only a few technologies have the potential to start a new branching series (specifically, by increasing diversity), have a lasting impact in human life and ultimately became turning points. When looking at the history of technology, we can see that all inventions are not of equal importance. Therefore, feminist design interventions into mobility environments can provide immediate practical solutions that would complement policy and lawmaking efforts that are necessary to ensure safety for women on public transport. Our analysis demonstrates that seemingly gender-neutral designs can be merely gender-blind in that they have significant impact in the gendered experiences of its users, which includes, in this case, being exposed to or feeling at risk of sexual harassment and assault in public transportation as a woman. The empirical basis of research comes from interviews with women passengers. Our case is vehicle design for public transportation, a product category that is, from the outset, relatively gender-neutral when compared to explicitly gender-segregated categories such as household electronics, cars, and toys, even if public transit users are more often women than men. This paper explores the gendered interactions that are mediated by designed products in actual use contexts. In this way, the work explores the role of consumption in the development of digital technology. The consequent trajectory of laptop computer design is then traced to show how it has become a product which has a mixture of associated meanings to a wide range of consumers.
#Transdata portable 1983 archive
Using corporate promotional material from the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester, and interviews with some of the designers and engineers involved in the creation of early portable computers, this work explores the development of the first real laptop computer, the 'GRiD Compass', in the context of its contemporaries. This article shows that the social drive for the development of portable computing came in part from the 'macho mystique' of concealed technology that was a substantial motif in popular culture at that time. While the laptop was a revolutionary product, such a narrative works to dismiss a series of products which predated the laptop but which had much the same aim, and to deny a social drive for such products, which had been in evidence for a number of years before the technology to achieve them was available.
Dominant design discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the introduction of the laptop computer as the result of 'inevitable' progress in a variety of disparate technologies, pulled together to create an unprecedented, revolutionary technological product.
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