Science, Technology and Innovation Culture

7 Technical Culture and Innovation Culture: Reconciling through Design

7.1. Introduction

This chapter questions the relationship between technical culture and innovation culture to return to the central role of design activity in the training context.

Gilbert Simondon’s [SIM 89/08] observation about culture excluding technology also points to this fascination with technical objects in everyday life, because they exclude from a culture with a universal purpose assumed by the status of sacred objects [SIM 89/08]. Technical culture, misunderstood and excluded, leaves room for a deficiency that manifests itself in an absence of its teaching in our training systems [LEQ 15].

Innovation culture, for its part, returns us to our industrial and post-industrial cultures, which lead us to an obstinate search for novelty that pushes us to obsolescence to provide a better guarantee of the advent of the new [BOU 12]. This search for novelty thus takes two characteristic forms: radical innovation (older) and incremental innovation, which is more recent, more widespread, more ephemeral, easier to handle, more attractive in the short term and characterizes a trend of late modernity [BOU 12].

To overcome this double impasse of a technical culture in the absence of training and an innovation culture reduced to incremental innovation characterized by a frenzy of short-term change, we propose the implementation of a didactic design [DID 11, DID 15, DID 16]. Thus, this chapter focuses on the effects ...