ORGANIZATION
Practical Action
The development organization Schumacher founded in 1966 as the Intermediate Technology Development Group — the institutional vehicle for transforming his philosophy of appropriate technology into tools actually used by millions of people in the Global South.
Practical Action — originally the Intermediate Technology Development Group — is the organization E. F. Schumacher founded in 1966 to develop and deploy the intermediate technology his philosophy called for. The founding recognized something Schumacher insisted throughout his work: appropriate technology does not emerge from market forces. It requires deliberate development, institutional support, and communities of practice that maintain and improve it over time. The organization spent its first fifty years developing small-scale irrigation systems, bicycle-powered tools, improved cook stoves, micro-hydroelectric installations, and hundreds of other technologies scaled to the conditions of the communities that used them. It renamed itself Practical Action in 2005 to reflect a broader mandate while preserving the core commitment. Its current work includes a growing focus on whether Schumacher's framework can be applied to digital and AI technologies — the question Berry and Stockman's 2024 work on intermediate artificial intelligence began to formalize.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The organization's founding