Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology (EDAT)

A new type of engineering degree course, entitled Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology (EDAT), at the University of Warwick, is described. After explaining the term 'appropriate technology' and its relationship to 'alternative and intermediate technology', the need for a new approach to teaching engineering design is developed. The reasons why present engineering undergraduates receive an education ill-suited to work in appropriate technology are examined. Implicit assumptions underlying all the teaching are claimed to produce graduates unfitted for work in many important fields, such as small firms, job creation, and overseas development. A new set of assumptions to underlie the teaching of appropriate technology are put forward and the resulting implications for the engineering design curriculum are examined. The development of the EDAT course is then described, and finally the course structure and teaching methods are outlined.
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Why Appropriate Technology?

Appropriate Technology has a bias towards technology choice, as it relates to detailed design (for example, sizing a machine component) up to technology policy (for example, national implementation of the Rio Conference's Agenda 21). It explores two particular themes within technology choice, namely sustainability and world development.

The taught modules include coverage of the sources and conservation of water and energy, intermediate technologies for rural development abroad and technology policy. For students with a particular interest in overseas development there is also access to modules taught by the University's Economics and Politics departments.

Sustainability is taken as having many meanings including stewardship of natural resources, fairness to future generations and economic viability without long-term subsidy. World development is interpreted here as the use of technology to narrow the rapidly widening material gap between rich and poor countries. Both sustainability and development are multi-disciplinary issues: although the Appropriate Technology elective approaches them via engineering, it travels a little way into their wider social and political settings.

Some students use the elective as a formal training in mechanical engineering which uses some unusual or interesting illustrations; whilst others take it because they have some ideological commitment to sustainability or to world development and hope to pursue an engineering career in pursuit of those ideals.

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