Evaluating New & Emerging Technologies
Evaluating New & Emerging Technologies
Design and technology never stands still. New materials, smart components and manufacturing processes appear every year, and a designer must judge whether each one is actually worth using. This lesson explores how designers carry out critical evaluation of new and emerging technologies, and how ethical and environmental thinking shapes design decisions today and in the future. Getting this right matters for your exam — questions that ask you to ‘evaluate’ or ‘discuss’ are marked on the quality of your reasoning, not just on what you already know.
Criteria for Critical Evaluation
Before a new technology reaches a real product, designers ask practical questions first. Is there enough budget to buy, license or research the technology? Will it be ready within the project’s timescale, or is it still years away from reliable use? These two constraints alone can rule out a promising technology if a business cannot afford it or cannot afford to wait for it to mature. A dazzling material demonstrated in a lab is worthless to a company that needs a working product on shelves next year.
Three further questions matter just as much. Who is the product actually for — a child, an elderly user, or someone with a disability, and does the technology suit their needs? What materials does the technology require, and are they realistically available? Finally, does the business have the manufacturing capabilities needed to make the product reliably, in the quantities required? A brilliant idea that a factory cannot actually build, or cannot build accurately, is not yet a usable design solution.
Critical evaluation of a new technology weighs up budget constraints, timescale, who the product is for, the materials needed, and the manufacturing capabilities available before it reaches production.
Contemporary & Future Scenarios
Critical evaluation also means thinking beyond the immediate brief. A new technology can be judged against contemporary and future scenarios such as responses to natural disasters, medical advances, travel, global warming and communication. A low-cost, waterproof water filter might be evaluated for how well it could perform in a flood-relief effort. A new lightweight composite might be judged on whether it reduces fuel use in transport, helping to tackle global warming. A wearable sensor might be evaluated for its potential in medical advances, such as monitoring a patient’s heart rate remotely. Considering these scenarios helps a designer see whether a technology has a future beyond its first intended use.
A designer is evaluating a solar-powered charging unit. Against the criterion of natural disasters, it scores well — it needs no mains electricity, so it could recharge phones after a power cut. Against travel, it is useful for hikers with no access to sockets. Against communication, it keeps devices running when networks are needed most, such as during an emergency. Weighing these scenarios together helps the designer decide the charger is worth developing further, even though it costs more to make than a standard charger.
Ethical Perspectives
Ethical perspectives ask questions about people, not just performance. Where was the product actually made, and under what conditions were the workers employed? Who made it — was the workforce paid and treated fairly, or exploited to keep costs low? Who benefits most from the sale of the product — the manufacturer, the retailer, or the original producer of the raw material? Many companies now look for fair trade products when sourcing raw materials such as cotton or cocoa, so that producers in developing countries are not exploited by unfair pricing.
Ethical evaluation considers where a product was made, who made it, who benefits from it, and whether it meets fair trade standards.
Environmental Perspectives
Environmental perspectives focus on impact rather than people. Designers consider the use of materials — are they renewable, recycled, or scarce and finite? They also estimate a product’s carbon footprint, the greenhouse gases released in making, moving and using it.
Energy usage and consumption during manufacture and transportation both add to that footprint — shipping a product by air uses far more energy than moving the same product by sea. To bring all of this together into one clear picture, designers use life cycle analysis (LCA), tracking impact from raw material extraction right through to disposal or recycling.
LCA breaks a product’s environmental impact into four stages: extracting raw materials, manufacturing and processing, use by the consumer, and final disposal or recycling. A product that scores well at the manufacturing stage might still have a poor overall LCA if it cannot be recycled or safely disposed of at the end of its life, so every stage must be considered together.
Bringing It Together
No single factor decides whether a new technology should be used. A cheap, fast, ethically sourced material with a low carbon footprint might still fail if it cannot survive the stresses a product will face, or if a factory lacks the machinery to shape it accurately. Strong evaluation weighs practical, ethical and environmental perspectives against each other, and reaches a judgement supported by evidence — exactly what the question is asking for when it says evaluate a technology rather than simply describe it.