Rural communities are the major entities in developing and third-world countries. While outsiders want to develop local community, they should develop the local conditions and sustain the result. In order to get sustainability among rural communities, technology become a booster to reach it. However, the success rate of many community development projects result only compare between “before” and after condition of technology implementation. Furthermore, when its result reaches sustainable condition of community development, many communities can not further maintain as well as develop their sustainable development because low level of empowerment. This paper attemped to develop conceptual framework how to reach the sustainable development in a community which was strengthened through the implementation of appropriate technology in order to reach empowerment. The framework will be constructed through literature survey and then combined with several sample cases to provide a comprehensive discussion. This paper concluded that empowerment was the next shape of sustainable development. Three stages of community development were revealed. Appropriate technology can be positioned as the bridging point in reaching empowerment of rural communities. By looking at previous efforts which treated sustainable development as the final purpose of community development projects, this paper gave new lights how to reach beyond it. Empowering rural communities, sustaining their sustainable development

Since the emerging of its idea circa four decades ago, Appropriate Technology (AT) had been proven as a comprehensive solution in a limited condition. However, practitioners & academia have different opinions with engineers on how an AT must be designed. Researchers had noted the crucial factors in the issue as such, and they gave a notion of the urgency for a dedicated design methodology for AT. This study, therefore, aims to provide it. Such methodology is developed by incorporating AT characteristics, fundamental issues in community empowerment, and the principles of existing design methodologies. The methodology emphasizes combination between bottom-up and top-down design approaches. It means that an AT must be started purely from local conditions rather than given technical specifications, and be given back to local people to be seamlessly integrated into their routines. It also underlines the crucial importance of community involvement throughout design stages. By looking at previous design methodologies that were developed based on pure Engineering Problem Solving (EPS), this study delivers a fresh and comprehensive one that covers surrounding issues and concepts to produce an AT based on the real meaning of technological appropriateness.

Cultural heritage is one important thing about the existence of a society. Therefore, now it's become increasingly important to preserve many valuable cultural heritage. It includes many kinds of art works. Recently, creative industries grow rapidly at SME scale. It increases opportunity to preserve cultural heritage through creative industry, as we know that many creative industry produce cultural product. The objective of this paper is to show how creative industries succeed in preserving cultural heritage. The methodology of this paper is a case study at Saung Angklung Udjo (SAU), one of creative industry which has successful business records on preserving angklung as a cultural heritage. In-depth interview was conducted to gather information, and will be combined with some archival data to build a comprehensive discussion. The study reveals several key successful factors to preserve cultural heritage by creative industry. The proposed factors can be used to predict the successfulness of another creative industry which is based on cultural products, or some practitioners may use them to build another business which has similar type with SAU

There were evidence for the inappropriateness of just three pillars of sustainability whenengineers have attempted to construct appropriate technology for underdevelopedcommunities. Engineers from developed countries have tended to conduct technologicaladaptations by treating communities as objects, rather than engaging them as subjects ofdevelopment. As objects, communities could not decide what they wanted to be and wereeven forced into systematic development that was more likely to benefit the developedcountries. However, as subjects, communities can determine their own sustainability andachieve survivability. In this study, seven pillars of survivability are outlined: technical,economic, environmental, social, cultural, judicial, and political. The first three aretangible aspects, and the last three are intangible. The social aspect is the intermediary, thebridge to emerging technological appropriateness. Tangible aspects can be measurednumerically, whereas the intangible ones cannot. The tangible and intermediate aspectsare what engineers must address, and both the intermediate and the intangible ones arewhat they must address specifically to diffuse appropriate technology into local dailyroutines. Tiers of technological appropriateness are also provided to understand theposition of a designed appropriate technology in terms of survivability levels. A holisticapproach that takes these pillars into account will empower communities to reach self-survivability beyond sustainability.