Efficiency and functionality have really driven our thinking about technological change. When you're explaining what you think is going on there, you want to push in a kind of morevision that's more about social practices as like the key to innovation. Not the eficiency plays no role. So why d why do you think that inter personal relationships and social practices give us like a better door end o the process?
Catherine Frieman, an associate professor of European Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, talks about her recent book, An Archaeology of Innovation: Approaching Social and Technological Change in Human Society, with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Her book offers a long-term perspective on innovation that only archaeology can offer and draws on case studies from across human history, from our earliest hominin ancestors to the present. The book makes several different arguments, but one of them is that our present narrow focus on pushing the adoption of technical innovations—especially so called “disruptive innovations”—ignores the complex social, technological, and environmental systems that undergirds successful societies.
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