I have always been interested and fascinated by puzzles, problems and riddles. Game-playing, puzzle-solving for fun, translates into problem-solving on a larger scale in the "real" world.

The progress of progress, of innovation and technology diffusion, is a well-studied area. How technology spreads has been thunk through a number of times...

1. Technology-push: in which clever people come up with technology, and the results get spread out to the waiting masses.
2. Consumer-pull: in which what people need/want influences the technology that people come up with.
3. ...

Here, I don't want to concentrate so much on the split between the concept of a technological "realm" and that of a "user" realm, but on the driving force, the seed-planter for technological ideas and the spread of them. I want to focus on the idea that problems are the vectors for technology. Problems can be "measured" on at least 2 scales. Firstly, a scale of "threat". The kettle not working is a smaller problem, on this axis, than an angry tiger in my room. Secondly, a scale of "immediacy", referring to how well we can perceive the problem, and how much we "understand" it affecting us. An immediate, direct problem would be that tiger again. A non-immediate (time-wise) problem could be the erosion of the ozone layer, or the end of the world. This leads to the idea of Problem Horizons, which in turn is linked with the Problematic Hierarchy.

These two axes combine to influence (both proportionately) how much a technology is "needed" or "wanted" - in reality, there is no dichotomy between need and want, only a sliding scale of "problem-solvability".

This is especially important because in order to understand a technology, we need to consider where it has come from, and what problems it has been "designed"/evolved to solve. This is a kind of Social Constructivism, but a rather narrow look at the field. Cultures may perhaps influence the invention and adoption of technologies. In fact, some people think that cultures are even embedded in technology, which is also relevant here.

----## Examples Most "problems" (that can't necessariyl be solved purely with technology) arise from trying to take a technology from a particular context, and apply it to another. This can be seen across two more axes:

• The "insertion" of technology on a scale axis - i.e. from globalised technology to localised.
• The "insertion" of technology on a "cultural" axis. This is slightly more fuzzy. One example is between developing and developed worlds. Now, between any 2 countries there are going to be differences in what most people commonly think of as "culture", which is one thing here. The other is concerned with the "context" as determined by other geographical/technological "features". We could think of the West as being a culture built on top of already-established, connected technology, and as such any further solutions will come out of a connected context. On the other hand, rural, isolated villages in developing countries have a different context, different problems, and different networks to solve these problems.

----## Consequences So what does this mean? I think it has consequences for how we think about bringing technology to the world, especially for problems that some people realise as being "important", while others don't necessarily care about it. Is it possible, for instance, to generate take-up of a technology by creating a problem of more immediacy, such that people take up the technology more quickly as a result? (An example of this could be taxing one technology to induce the other - the "problem" in this case is the over-use of financial resources.)

It also means that to understand the spread of technology, we need to understand the nature of problems themselves.

(See also: Webbed Solutions New Technology Problematic Hierarchy )