Technology is a crucial and evolving element of people’s daily lives – at home, work, and play. Whether it is mobile devices, virtual customer relationship management systems or online marketplaces, the way people interact with each other and with the natural world has been profoundly shaped by technology. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines are therefore interested in understanding technologies in their own right, as well as their embeddings and relationships to the wider social and cultural contexts in which they exist.

The scholarly concept of technology is not neutral; it concerns itself with how knowledge is creatively applied to organised tasks involving machines and people that meet sustainable goals. As such, it includes not just the sublime of planetary science but also the mundane of changing gear when driving a car or brushing your teeth. It is this intervening power that makes technology different from other methods and techniques, whether wholly mental or material.

Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that technologies are often designed and built by people. This is not to revert back to the 19th Century vision of the world that was dominated by lone inventors and a technocracy, but to recognise that the development of technology is fundamentally a collective process. It is this social nature of technology that allows it to advance, not just in terms of the speed at which it develops but also as a tool for managing societal change.