Technologies of the Future
This course has been by far one of the most interesting and exciting courses I have ever taken. Throughout the semester we learned through lectures, workshops, and lab work about leadership, design thinking, cultivating a growth mindset, and otherwise applying your skills for new technology creation. For my concentration, I learned a lot about where good ideas come from and how best to cultivate them, which can definitely be applied to the AgTech sector. For example, the most productive sector when it comes to practical inventions is academia. By making incentivizing academic research on agricultural technologies, perhaps more useful technologies may emerge. Also, innovation can be further spurred by breaking down barriers and encouraging collaboration and casual exchange of ideas.
We also learned a lot about bio-inspired design, which I am not aware of how it is or isn’t being utilized in AgTech, but there could definitely be potential for technologies based in how plants growing patterns or through chemicals produced by plants. At the very least, bio-marketing can be used to help appeal technologies to a larger market.
This can be seen through a project we completed on using kale wax to waterproof surfaces. This project was inspired by seeing how water beads up on kale and hearing how people were tired of being wet after walking through the rain. We were able to create a spray that recrystallized the wax on other surfaces to waterproof them. However, what caught peoples attention was our use of kale. And as a potential investor explained, our product was simple and trendy.
This course has definitely shifted my focus in my concentration towards entrepreneurship, something I had considered but not fully embraced before. It has made me realize that I am really interested how the big ideas of AgTech change the world, not necessarily just their technical benefits.
History of Science, Technology, & Culture
This history course showed the development of ideas in science from Copernicus onward. This helped to give perspective of how ideas change the world. For example, we read a book on how industrial revolution was caused by the patent law and democratizing invention. What really stood out to me was the way in which all parts of a culture struggle with new ideas. For instance, art movements often reflected scientific discoveries; at the same time, both Picasso and Einstein dealt with relativistic perceptions of time. Multiple ideas happen around the same time as well, for example the simultaneous discovery of the law of conservation of energy by several different people at the same time.
This course also help through reading about Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigms. This helped explain why it was so difficult for fresh ideas to permeate through culture; it took a while to break a paradigm. This also helped to illuminate environmentalism as a whole, and I wrote a paper explaining how facts in the environmental sciences do not exist outside of a paradigm as highlighted by environmental cornerstones of limits to growth, tragedy of the commons, and purity/balance in nature. This is interesting in how history provides a deep context for these ideas. They are based in romanticism, a backlash to industrialism and rapid development. This also brings ecomodernism in a new context as it represents a paradigm shift that reverses the nostalgic past/ dystopic future mindset brought out in traditional environmentalism. Being a part of this huge shift also helps explain what attracts me to ecomodernism – it represents a huge change in perception and culture. For me, that’s hugely exciting.
Along with my Technologies of the Future class, this history class has furthered pushed my interests toward how ideas change culture. AgTech is an exciting extension of that as demonstrated in my posts on boundary pushing ideas of golden rice and in vitro meat.