Melchior Huijts
As an aerospace engineer, I am usually busy with optimizing a certain technology for its use in an aircraft. A design for which the requirements are technical and tangible. So the challenge of investigating sustainable technologies that need to be embedded in society has already shown to be a new one to me. It has even already come to mind that changing a society trough a sustainable technology, could perhaps only mean that the mind-set of the people has to change.
Many technologies that can reduce emissions, waste and pollution have already been invented or presented. Initiatives to sell deformed vegetables and fruits in special shops or start shops that do not use packaging are already out there, but do not yet fully become a success. Most of these initiatives require the consumer to change their daily routines. This is understandable in my opinion, if you do not intrinsically believe in the cause of sustainability. Changing yourself or your behaviour for reasons that you do not fully support, is unlikely to happen. As a person you value the way things are and have been, the nature of a person is to be conservative about the things that he/she likes.
In pure technology development, this so-needed personal incentive for change for people is often not thought of. New technologies are initially shaped the way it is most convenient for the engineer. To be honest, most high-tech innovations in aircraft for instance do not affect the passenger directly, only indirectly by making flying cheaper and thus making the ticket become cheaper in the end. But there are some successes that show how to properly let people welcome a new technology in their lives.
A very interesting new sustainable technology of the last few years that displays perfectly how an innovation has been adapted to the conservative nature of the people is the shape of LED-lights. By nature, LED-lights are about the size of a pea, but they are sold in the shape of the old-fashioned glowing light bulb. A pear-like bulb, about the size of a mandarin orange. Since they LED-light is much smaller than the size of a bulb that people are used to, it was relatively easy for the developers to just built a casing around this LED light that resembles the old bulb. Also attaching the already existing fitting to it is no real challenge, and it makes its use completely interchangeable with that of the existing bulb. Looking at your newly adopted technology, in the comforting way as it has always looked is just the easiest. So by taking into account what people valued in the original product and in what ways the consumer would probably be willing to change, a product was created that could easily be adopted in any home.
Although one can argue if society needs to change, it is not to be disputed that a change will have the greatest chances of being adopted when it is within the comfort zone of the people.