scholarly journals Design Function in Innovation Processes

Author(s):  
Anna Estany ◽  
Rosa M. Herrera

Some words emerge at a given moment to catalyse ideas and give new meaning to old terminology. Innovation and design are two such words. Innovation has traditionally been linked with the Applied Sciences, especially technology, whereas advances in the PureSciences tend to be termed discoveries, inventions, or creations. However, for decades now, innovation has been a leitmotiv in all fields of scientific knowledge in both the Pure and the Applied Sciences. Design has also emerged from the niche it once occupied for decades (andeven centuries) at least insofar as its impact on the History of Science and of Philosophy is concerned. In fact, design’s introduction into the academic world has gone hand-in-hand with Art and its impact on our daily lives. This paper analyses innovation processes in boththe Pure and the Applied Sciences to discover how far new design theories over the last few decades have influenced innovation in fields such as Epistemology and Technology. We focus on Design Epistemology and methodological innovation, specifically in connectionwith design simulations and methodological models. We also look at the underlying design technologies and the key role they play in innovation processes.

Author(s):  
Staffan Müller-Wille

This article explores what both historians of medicine and historians of science could gain from a stronger entanglement of their respective research agendas. It first gives a cursory outline of the history of the relationship between science and medicine since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Medicine can very well be seen as a domain that was highly productive of scientific knowledge, yet in ways that do not fit very well with the historiographic framework that dominated the history of science. Furthermore, the article discusses two alternative historiographical approaches that offer ways of thinking about the growth of knowledge that fit well with the cumulative and translational patterns that characterize the development of the medical sciences, and also provide an understanding of concepts such as ‘health’ and ‘life’.


Author(s):  
Juliana Mesquita Hidalgo ◽  
Daniel De Medeiros Queiroz

ResumoO presente trabalho visa contribuir com a fundamentação teórica para a escrita de biografias científicas com fins didáticos. O gênero biográfico é um legítimo foro de “humanização” do conhecimento científico, um dos papéis centrais da inserção didática da História da Ciência. Recortes biográficos que não representem os cientistas com caráter sobre-humano, escritos não como absoluta verdade, e sim como história interpretada, podem ser úteis no contexto educacional. Sugerimos a escrita de recortes biográficos destinados à educação científica que considere os novos aportes do gênero, isto é, à luz de fundamentos historiográficos atualizados. São apresentados subsídios da área disciplinar História, a exemplo da perspectiva de história-problema, e subsídios da História da Ciência, em objeção às biografias laudatórias.Palavras-chave: Biografia Científica; Gênero Biográfico; Historiografia.AbstractThis paper aims to contribute for the theoretical foundation concerning the writing of scientific biographies for didactic purposes. Biographical genre is a legitimate forum “to humanize” the scientific knowledge, one of the central roles of the didactic insertion of the History of Science. Biographical fragments not representative of scientists as “superhuman” and written as interpreted history, may be useful in the educational context. We suggest the writing of biographical fragments for science education that consider the new contributions of the genre, in other words, in light of historiographical foundations currently accepted. Subsidies from the disciplinary area History are presented, such as the perspective of history as problem, and subsidies from History of Science, in objection to laudatory biographies.Keywords: Scientific Biography; Biographical Genre; Historiography.


2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Roy Weintraub

While most scientists and philosophers of science privilege scientific knowledge, and have sought demarcations of science from non-science to justify the privilege, sociologists of science, small numbers of philosophers of science, anthropologists, and some scientists themselves have been attracted to a new way of talking about science. Prefigured by Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979) and Gaston Bachelard (1934/1984), nurtured by the controversies over Thomas Kuhn's work, and instantiated in the Edinburgh School's Strong Program, the naturalistic turn portrays science as a human activity, part of the woof and warp of culture itself. Yet curiously historians of science have been less involved in this recent reconceptualization of both science and scientific knowledge.


Antiquity ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 22 (85) ◽  
pp. 29-32
Author(s):  
V. Gordon Childe

A Minute study of metal work can make extraordinarily illuminating contributions to the history of science and to economic history, and can substantially enhance our appreciation of early art and culture in general. But it requires not only technical and historical knowledge but also quite costly apparatus and an unusual complaisancy in museum directors. Oldeberg possesses an expert’s familiarity with metallurgical processes and a truly remarkable mastery of the relevant geological and archaeological literature. The State Historical Museum in Stockholm is equipped with a good spectroscope wisely used for the increase of scientific knowledge. To the same end various Swedish museums have permitted the analysis of 640 specimens and a microscopic examination of 34 dating from the ‘Copper Age’ to Viking times. (The number of analyses actually at the author’s disposal and published is brought up to 747 by the inclusion of earlier reports on Danish, Norwegian and Finnish objects). The publication of such results alone, especially when as here illustrated by 800 splendid photographs, would constitute an outstanding event in prehistory.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Yoshiko Reed

The full publication of 4Q208 and 4Q209 in 2000 has enabled a renaissance of research on the Enochic Astronomical Book, illumining its deep connections with Babylonian scholasticism and spurring debate about the precise channels by which such “scientific” knowledge came to reach Jewish scribes. This article asks whether attention to Aramaic manuscripts related to the Astronomical Book might also reveal something about Jewish scribal pedagogy and literary production in the early Hellenistic age, particularly prior to the Maccabean Revolt. Engaging recent studies from Classics and the History of Science concerning astronomy, pedagogy, and the place of scribes and books in the cultural politics of the third century bce, it uses the test-case of the Astronomical Book to explore the potential significance of Aramaic sources for charting changes within Jewish literary cultures at the advent of Macedonian rule in the Near East.


2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-219
Author(s):  
Alexander Thumfart

During the last three decades research in the rhetoric of natural science has established itself as a prominent topic in the history of science, culture, and society. Despite this overall success, the status, function and place of rhetoric in the process of knowledge production is still ambivalent and disputed. While some scholars place rhetoric right in the centre of the construction of scientific knowledge, others support the view that scientific knowledge is epistemologically privileged. Based on research done by the prominent sociologist, philosopher, and historian Bruno Latour, the article argues that rhetoric plays a minimal role in the production of knowledge but is crucial in the dissemination and (successful) implementation of scientific results.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
Sigouveny Cruz Cardoso ◽  
Erivanildo Lopes da Silva

No ensino de Ciências, o conhecimento científico para a tomada de decisão pode ser um fator preponderante para fundamentar o desenvolvimento de abordagens metodológicas para a resolução de problemas em sala de aula. Desse modo, a História da Ciência é considerada uma abordagem fundamental para essa contextualização do conhecimento científico em propostas didáticas que visem o desenvolvimento de habilidades cognitivas relacionadas ao pensamento crítico dos estudantes. Neste estudo, considera-se complexa a elaboração de propostas didáticas para o ensino de Ciências sem um modelo que direcione as atividades para tal finalidade. Então, esta pesquisa objetiva estabelecer aproximações teóricas entre a História da Ciência e o pensamento crítico para o ensino de Ciências, propondo um modelo teórico com articulações entre seus objetivos. Ao considerar o conhecimento para a tomada de decisão como um aspecto central dessas aproximações, o estudo apresenta correlações implícitas e explícitas para o planejamento de propostas didáticas. Essas articulações teóricas possuem implicações consideradas fundamentais para a educação científica, em virtude de apresentar um modelo teórico para ensinar Ciências pelas dimensões teóricas de análise, problematização e distinção de informações científicas, ao materializá-las em atividades de aprendizagem que viabilizem a tomada de decisão e a resolução de problemas científicos.Theoretical model of approaches for the teaching of Science between the premisses of the History of Science and critical thinkingAbstractIn Science education, scientific knowledge for decision-making can be a major factor to support the development of methodological approaches to problem solving in the classroom. In this way, the History of Science is considered a fundamental approach for this contextualization of scientific knowledge, in didactic proposals that aim at the development of cognitive skills related to students’ critical thinking. In this study, the elaboration of didactic proposals for the teaching of Science is considered complex, without a model that directs activities for this purpose. So, this research aims to establish theoretical approaches between the History of Science and critical thinking, for the teaching of Science, proposing a theoretical model with articulations between its objectives. When considering knowledge for decision making as a central aspect of these approaches, the study presents implicit and explicit correlations for the planning of didactic proposals. These theoretical articulations have implications considered fundamental for scientific education, as they present a theoretical model for teaching Science through the theoretical dimensions of analysis, problematization and distinction of contextualized scientific information, when materializing them in learning activities that enable decision-making and solving scientific problems.Keywords: History of science; Critical thinking; Theoretical approaches; Science teaching.


The chapter authors detail local engagements with technology and the natural world in Latin America across time and reveal the social, political, and economic conditions that have led to the relative obscurity of such research in a world history of science. Comparative thinking is an important feature in this volume, as it helps situate the issue of Latin American scientific innovation within the global currents of science and understand the particular inequalities they produce and reproduce. The asymmetries that govern the global production of scientific knowledge have certainly affected the kind of science that is possible “at the periphery,” to use the term adopted by many Latin American historians of science. While examining a number of cases from the colonial times to the present, we propose a critical understanding of how such asymmetries have operated. To give an example, the history of science in Latin America has been bound up, since colonization, with that of Spain, sharing its peripheral status in the global history of science. This representation is now beginning to be challenged with greater attention to the “dynamic and multiple” exchanges that characterized the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge in the colonial era and to the particular forms taken by colonial science. A number of chapters in this volume contribute to this new thrust in scholarship on colonial Spanish and Latin American science.


2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
FIONA WILLIAMSON

AbstractThis article explores meteorological interest and experimentation in the early history of the Straits Settlements. It centres on the establishment of an observatory in 1840s Singapore and examines the channels that linked the observatory to a global community of scientists, colonial officers and a reading public. It will argue that, although the value of overseas meteorological investigation was recognized by the British government, investment was piecemeal and progress in the field often relied on the commitment and enthusiasm of individuals. In the Straits Settlements, as elsewhere, these individuals were drawn from military or medical backgrounds, rather than trained as dedicated scientists. Despite this, meteorology was increasingly recognized as of fundamental importance to imperial interests. Thus this article connects meteorology with the history of science and empire more fully and examines how research undertaken in British dependencies is revealing of the operation of transnational networks in the exchange of scientific knowledge.


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