Since the end of the 1960s, anthropotechnology has focused on the study and improvement of working and living conditions. It contributes to transforming the situations in which it intervenes at the request of social partners from diverse fields (companies, agricultural industry, national and international institutions, research, minorities and so on) in several countries1. Founded on an ergonomic approach to labor, anthropotechnology began to move away from this approach early on because of the shift that it represented. Anthropotechnology intervenes in multicultural situations in the context of technology transfer, and by extension, in all situations where the future use of a technique or an object to design is different from the one that initially inspired it.
This difference creates offsets between a prescribed activity (what ought to be done) and a real activity (what is really done by users), with repercussions that often have serious consequences for individuals and communities. Anthropotechnology contributes to anticipating these discrepancies. It informs design processes by making them attentive to the “human factor”, its collective aspects and the overdetermined dimensions of the concept, which are social, cultural and environmental. Consequently, anthropotechnology value design is centered on individuals and how they think and act in specific contexts. To do this, it unites a set of core competencies around a single request in order to understand as many aspects of the intervention situation as possible. It “is part of the “bottom-up” approach, and for this reason it is similar to other similar methods in Human Sciences: ethnology, psychodynamics, etc. It is used to answer a precise question and it is geared toward proposing operational solutions”
Source:Inside Anthropotechnology
