Download Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity AudioBook Free

From the author of Why Things Bite Back which introduced us to the revenge antics of technology - Our Own Devices is a wonderfully revealing look at the inventions of day-to-day things that protect us, position us, or enhance our performance. In helping and hurting us, these body systems have produced outcomes that their creators never supposed:

• In postwar Japan traditional sandals gave way to Western-style shoes because they were considered marks of an increased quality lifestyle, but they critically increased the pace of fungal foot ailments.
• Reclining chair, originally promoted for healthful brief relaxation, became icons of the inactive life and weight problems.
• A computer keyboard that made the piano easier to learn failed in the marketplace due to the fact professional pianists believed difficult passages had a need to stay difficult.
• Helmets, reintroduced during the carnage of World Conflict I, preserved the lives of many civilian miners, construction workers, and, more recently, bicyclists.

Once we step on the treadmill machine of improvement, it's hard to step off. Yet Edward Tenner demonstrates human being ingenuity can be applied in self-preservation as well, and he sheds light on the ways that the users of commonplace technology delight designers and designers, as when early on typists developed the touch method still employed on today's keyboards. And he offers concrete advice for reaping advantages from the devices that people no longer seem to be able to live without. Although dependent on these items, we can also utilize them to liberate ourselves. This wonderful and instructive history of invention shows why National Community Radio dubbed Tenner, "the philosopher of day-to-day technology."