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Lecture 4: Technology Assessment & Measuring Sustainability

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Technology Assessment & Measuring Sustainability This lecture is an exploration of what technology assessment is by examples and a brief history. New technologies can create new problems that are not foreseen since people use technologies in unpredictable manners. We talk about technology assessment when we the study the societal consequences of new technologies. Different types of technology assessment will be discussed: classical technology assessment, strategic technology assessment and constructive technology assessment. This lecture also pays attention to the principles of technology forecasting and to the measuring sustainability by means of the ecological footprint.
Key-words: Societal change, technology assessment, forecasting.

Reading: Chapter 4 and 6 of ‘Sustainable Development for Engineers’: Sustainable development and economic, social and political structures (this lecture is a continuation of lecture 4, both on chapter 4 of the book) and: Measuring sustainability (Chapter 6).

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Sustainable Development for Engineers by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/sustainable-dev-for-engineers/.