Principles for designing technology and culture planning indicators

Abstract

The focus of the present Malaysia Seminar is on something new-developing indicators that link technological change with culture. What is new is the idea of linkage not the separate indicators themselves, for when one peruses either national statistics or publications like the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook, such indicators do exist already - eg: of numbers of television sets, telephones, cars, or numbers of libraries, museums, newspapers and magazines sold, moneys spent on promotion of craft, scientific temper, etc. At the outset we should be aware however of why we are even interested in this linkage. It is not, I would suggest, to provide yet another set of indicators, or to hold yet another set of interesting discussions as such. Rather, our purpose is to build a new source of information that can be used by development planners. Implied then is that the linkage is important, yet not adequately visible within the development process.