Culture's Engine: Inside Science and Technology

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- 1: Introduction -- 2: The Odd Couple -- Chicken and Egg and Chicken Again -- Doxastic Delivers -- Mysteries of the Craft -- 3: Why Are Humans Different? -- The Great Discontinuity -- 4: Three Flavours of Technology -- The Technology of Matter -- But Energy Was Not Far Behind -- The Wonders of Steam -- If I Only Had Wings -- The First Passenger-Carrying Airline -- Information, the Technology of Feeble Electric Currents -- Godalming, Cradle of Worldwide Electrical Power -- 5: Subtle Subversives -- Small Is Beautiful -- Going Cordless -- Power for Free -- Lighten Our Darkness -- Less Ambitious Information Technology -- The Small Revolutions -- 6: The Active Elements Appear -- The Edison Effect -- Silicon's Tanks on the Vacuum Lawn -- 7: Drivers of Technology -- Politics Is a Funny Old Game -- 8: Technology's Other Half -- How to Sponsor a Design -- Failed Designs -- Learning Design the Hard Way -- Competing Designs -- Wholly Rational Is Unattainable -- Coping with the Irrational -- Design Begins -- 9: Talk the Talk -- From Dissenting to Canonical and Contrariwise -- Multiple Canonical Designs -- Canonical and Dissenting Processes and Services -- Design by Evolution -- Revolutionary Designs -- The Quest for Perfection-A Deadly Trap -- 10: Patterns of Innovation -- More of the Same -- Passing Over of Quantity into Quality1 -- The Knight's Move -- The Prophetic Role of Precursors -- Lucretia, Dead and Buried -- The Analogue Era -- The Honourable Failures -- Precursors Now? -- 11: Invention Push and Market Pull -- Charm -- Perceived Feasibility -- Perceived Market -- From Push to Pull -- Design Too Has a Natural History -- Complications -- Sailing-Ship Effect -- 12: Deep Design -- Can Something Come from Nothing? -- Metaphor Plays Its Part -- How Does Creativity Operate in Practice?.