Modeling Technology

There are many other ways to divide up technological actions. For twenty years the International Technology Education Association promoted dividing it into Manufacturing, Construction, Communication, and Transportation. Or we could look at technology as a type of processing, dividing into Information Processing, Energy Processing, and Material Processing. As a materials science teacher, I commonly use Procurement, Transformation, Utilization, and Disposition as organizers for the study of material-related technologies.
But one problem common to traditional views of technology is a lack of attention to the interconnectedness within and extending outside of a system. For example, one typical model that is used to represent any dynamic system has sometimes been called the Universal Systems Model (what an arrogant title.) It involves Input, Process, and Output (IPO), with feedback that flows in the opposite direction. But there is no connection to other systems, and the IPO model is linear, with starting and ending points. That just doesn't seem realistic.
For example, to build a guitar, we need 3 board feet (I'm guessing) of Brazilian Rosewood, among other things. Typical processes are sawing, gluing, and finishing. The outputs include the guitar and wood chips. But this model has no way to look at where the rosewood came from, or if it should have been harvested in the first place. It doesn't look at the history the precedes inputs, nor the consequences that may be distant. Is one of the outputs of Indiana's coal-fired generators dead fish in New York? I wouldn't say so, but I would call it one of the impacts.
But typically, we are more concerned with process than with implications or impacts. Learning a process might be a short-term need, and we may not have the guts to take a broader view.
Stephen Petrina, at the University of British Columbia, adapted a catch phrase on his web site related to technology: "Think globally, act locally" was the phrase, adapted to "Think globally, act globally, think locally, act locally."