94/2026

Riccardo Barbone

The Evolution of Piping Systems: A Low-Tech Perspective on Water, Craft, and the Long Continuity of Flow

Piping systems offer a revealing way to think about low tech. They show that it is not the absence of technology or an early development stage that modern engineering has outgrown. At its best, it is a way of solving problems that is durable, repairable, and closely adapted to local conditions. From ancient irrigation channels and aqueducts to industrial piping and modern fluid systems, the history of flow shows a long series of engineering choices shaped less by grand visions than by reliability, upkeep considerations, and practical fit.

Franziska Eggimann

Going global from Schaffhausen: Internanationalization at Georg Fischer from 1802 to the Present

This article shows the process of internationalization
at Georg Fischer AG by no means as a linear success story but rather as a complex learning process shaped by crises, politics, and technological developments. During Johann Conrad Fischer’s wide-ranging European travels, the long export-oriented phase that followed, and the shifting of production abroad for defensive reasons in the first half of the twentieth century, internationalization was driven by the need to react
to events as they came up. Only since the 1970s has internationalization become a fundament that gives corporate structures their shape: Acquisitions and globally distributed structures with locations around the world have transformed Georg Fischer (GF) into a multinational corporation. Comparisons with other Swiss enterprises show that GF is an example for an internationalization process that has advanced cautiously but produced robust and lasting results.

Maximilian Gasch

Gas Generators as Propulsion Technology in World War II: An Example of Low Tech from the History of the Dresden Institute for Automotive Research

Using the example of the Dresden Institute for Automotive Research, this article examines a technological
shift during the Second World War. In the face of
massive resource shortages, the institute’s research focus shifted from innovative high-tech projects like ballistic missiles and heavy tanks toward pragmatic low-tech solutions. A central element of this analysis
is the gas generator for utilizing solid fuels, which was deployed on a massive scale starting in 1943 despite technical flaws and safety risks. The study shows that the simplicity of its production and maintenance was crucial to securing the Wehrmacht’s mobility and sustaining the war economy in a situation marked by scarcity. Consequently, this supposedly regressive technology contributed significantly to prolonging the war.

Clemens Janke

Treatin Brain Damage with an Intercom: Low-Tech Strategies in Medical Engineering at GDR Hospitals 1980s

This paper examines low-tech medical engineering strategies used in the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) healthcare system in the 1980s. Based on a case study of the Combitest II, a diagnostic device
for brain damage housed in a repurposed intercom casing, it analyzes how systemic shortages and technological lag fostered resource-efficient innovation. Drawing on a contemporary low tech framework, it shows how interdisciplinary teams developed cost-effective, locally adaptable devices by means
of repurposing and small-scale production, which promoted knowledge transfer. These practices
reveal an alternative model of high-tech development, demonstrating how constraints can generate
frugal innovation.

Stefan Krebs

Conluding Remarks on the History of Low Tech

Steven Lubar

Brooms, Shovels, and Metis: Hand Tools as a Model for Understanding Technology

This essay argues that low tech—tools in general, and specifically brooms and shovels—can provide a model for understanding technology as a contingent, embodied, and social practice rather than a mere sequence of innovations. Exploring the Greek concepts of episteme and metis, it highlights the situational intelligence and human agency that are visible in sweeping and shoveling but are often concealed in more complex technological systems. Considering low tech, it suggests, offers a route to understanding individuality and meaning in our technological world.

Simon Maier & Heike Weber

Low-Tech Engineering: The Interdisciplinary Project Group for Appropriate Technology (IPAT) at Tu Berlin, 1970s-1980s 

This paper examines the Interdisciplinary Project Group for Appropriate Technology (Interdisziplinäre Projektgruppe für Angepasste Technologie, IPAT) at TU Berlin as an example of low-tech engineering and alternative technological thinking in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Emerging from development-oriented student networks within the broader political and countercultural milieu of the late 1960s, IPAT developed its own approach to technology that combined ecological critique, participatory organization, and practical engineering. Focusing on projects involving wind-powered water pumps, solar desalination, decentralized energy systems, and agro-food recycling, the paper shows how appropriate technology aimed at resource-conserving, repairable, and community-oriented
systems. It argues that many of IPAT’s experimental approaches anticipated current debates on sustainability, decentralization, and resilient infrastructures.

Catharine Rossi

A Recent History of the Handmade: From Modern Craft to Post-Craft, from Making to Growing

This article explores the resurgence of hands-on making in the contemporary craft revival, highlighting designers and architects willing to get their hands dirty as a critical riposte to a hands-off world. Rooted in design history, and using concepts of modern craft and post-craft, it explores concepts of craft as a way to think through low tech, and vice versa—how to use the low tech to think through craft. To this end, it identifies three interrelated terrains of historical and contemporary crossover: the technical, the ideological, and the environmental. Finally, it considers how contemporary design’s interest in low-tech, craft-based approaches has translated more recently into not just making, but growing objects and buildings.

Zoe Shipley

Japanese Bridge Technology as a Case Study for Considering the Concept of Low Tech

Low tech has been proposed as a useful analytical tool for the history of science and technology; its proponents argue that the concept decentralizes progress and highlights innovation. This article examines the bridges of Meiji Japan (1868–1912) within a low tech framework and demonstrates thereby how designating technologies as low tech is a fraught process that produces ambivalent results. As a concept, low tech defies systematic application because it is geographically
and temporally relative and lacks definitive parameters. In addition, it perpetuates a hierarchical way of thinking, for the term itself is reminiscent of problematic civilizational discourse. Thus while low tech purports to offer
a new academic framework, it retains many of the same problems as research focused on high tech—albeit in a different guise.

Beatriz Silva

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs): A Low-Tech Conceptual Tool in AI and Beyond

The directed acyclic graph (DAG)—consisting of nodes linked by directed, nonlooping edges—underpins modern neural networks and AI pipelines yet recurs across eight centuries of precomputational history:
in a thirteenth-century genealogical scroll, in
nineteenth-century flow maps by Minard and Sankey, and in Darwin’s 1837 evolutionary tree. This recurrence reveals the DAG to be a low-tech conceptual infrastructure—minimal in complexity, yet enduring because it captures something true about directed, irreversible processes. In pharmaceutical drug discovery, DAG-
based Bayesian networks show this low-tech logic
can outperform opaque AI where transparency is paramount. The history of the DAG reveals a layered dependence of high-tech systems on low-tech foundations that has been neglected by historians.

Joshua Dao-Wei Sim, Yuyin Huang & Jason Kai Wei Lee

Alternatices to High-Tech Air-Con: Exertional and Everyday Low-Tech Heat Management Practices in Postcolonial Singapore 

Mainstream discourses of postcolonial Singapore’s heat management often focus on air-conditioning as a high-tech solution. We correct these narratives by excavating histories of low-tech cooling and focusing on a diverse repertoire of exertional and everyday heat management practices that have remained in
use despite air-conditioning’s popularization.
We argue that low-tech cooling in Singapore emerges from these historically continuous everyday practices and from non-mechanized and/or low-energy solutions introduced to address exertional heat. These findings challenge Eurocentric definitions of low tech by demonstrating the practical difficulties of disentangling high tech from low tech in a modern Asian society.

Madhulika Sonkar

 "A Handloom Needs Hunar (Talent), Not High-Tech Tools": Pedagogies of Revival and Representation Among Muslim Artisans in Contemporary India

Shifting away from historical approaches that have framed the ancient craft of zardozi as in need of reform, this article explores the everyday pedagogies and strategies deployed by Muslim women artisans to reinvent embroidery practices in contemporary India.
It examines the diverse ways in which these artisans collectively construct practices that do not necessarily thrive on high-end, sophisticated technologies of design and production. These everyday practices, aimed at preserving and reviving the craft, are also sites of rethinking historical conceptualizations of low tech, as artisans generate locally produced vocabularies of innovation, development, and survival. This article maps the multiple ways in which zardozi artisans counter the imaginary of high technologies as saviors of the low-tech handloom.

Jörg Spinatsch

Memories: The History of Georg Fischer AG from the Staff Perspective

Preserving and curating the history of Georg Fischer AG (GF) falls under the remit of the GF Corporate Archives. Collecting the memories of former staff members and conserving them for posterity is central to this endeavor. Rich sources have resulted mainly from two projects, memoirs written in the 1950s in connection with the company’s 150th jubilee and oral history interviews that the Iron Library and GF Corporate Archives team have been conducting regularly since 2025. These personal insights into historical developments complement other existing sources and open up new vistas on the history of GF. Both projects are introduced and analyzed comparatively here.

Patryk Wasiak

Slow Computing: What Do Computers Have in Common with Low Tech?

This article discusses a technology that seems to sit at the opposite end of the spectrum to what is typically thought of as “low tech”: computers. In relation to computers, it examines a range of interconnections and contrasts between high tech and low tech—or rather, in this specific context, slow tech. The analysis begins with a discussion of what is considered “high” in the high technology of computers. Later, it explores how computers can be redefined within the framework of slow technology. 

Silke Zimmer-Merkle

 A Low-Tech Toy or a High-Tech Means of Transportation: Reflections on the History of the Kick Scooter

This article examines the kick scooter as a historically persistent children’s mobility device through the analytical lens of low tech. It explores how restrained material use, technological simplicity, human-powered propulsion, and practices of use and reuse have shaped the scooter’s long-term adaptability. The analysis reveals that the scooter’s apparently low-tech character becomes more complex when considering motorized variants and adult uses, revealing blurred boundaries between children’s and adult mobility. The article finds that conceptions of low tech constitute a productive analytical perspective (albeit one with inherent limitations) for historicizing children’s mobility and everyday technologies.

Christopher Zoller-Blundell

From Hortus Conclusus to Arboretum: A (Technological) History of the Trees in Paradies

This article explores the ancient relationship between trees, technology, and knowledge through the historical lens of the Iron Library and the history of the Paradies arboretum. Arboriculture is one of humanity’s oldest technologies and gradually evolved into a structured body of scientific, legal, and ecological knowledge. Drawing on key texts preserved in the Iron Library, the article traces how the discipline of forestry developed and situates the Paradies arboretum within this history. It examines the transformation of a medieval hortus conclusus into a curated collection of trees and presents the arboretum as a living synthesis of historical memory, scientific inquiry, and ecological stewardship to highlight its ongoing role as a site of learning, adaptation, and cultural continuity.