Conference Program

This contribution explores how low-cost upcycling practices can function as material infrastructures for democratic engineering education. Within the Transformer project at TU Wien, an interdisciplinary outreach and co-creation initiative addressing climate and energy challenges, discarded office folders, plastic packaging, and other waste materials are shaped into furniture, inflatable mechanisms, and experimental prototypes. Rather than relying on specialized equipment and conventional purpose-designed workshop materials, these workshops deliberately employ materials that are commonly perceived as trash.

Drawing on Richard Sennett’s notion of porous boundaries in urban and social systems (Sennett, 2018), such material choices dissolve boundaries between formal engineering education and everyday life. By bringing everyday materials into structured workshops, informal experimentation and formal learning begin to overlap. By working with low-value materials, participants experience engineering not as a distant, high-tech discipline, but as an accessible practice grounded in experimentation and improvisation.

(1) Threshold Accessibility: Upcycled materials reduce financial and psychological barriers, creating liminal spaces of experimentation that resonate with the concept of threshold learning (Meyer & Land, 2003). Engineering principles become approachable through hands-on exploration rather than abstract instruction.

(2) Material Emancipation: Objects designed for disposal are reconfigured as tools of agency. This shift resonates with emancipatory pedagogical traditions that emphasize active transformation over passive consumption (Freire, 1970), finds contemporary expression in democratic education theories foregrounding agency and subjectification (Biesta, 2017), and aligns with socio-material approaches that understand learning as entangled with material practices (Fenwick et al., 2011).

(3) Reframing Engineering Practice: By working with discarded and low-value materials, participants encounter engineering as a process of exploration rather than precision and control. The absence of expensive equipment and predefined outcomes shifts attention from technical perfection to iterative experimentation. Engineering thus appears not as an exclusive high-tech discipline, but as an accessible civic practice grounded in creativity, responsibility, and collective problem-solving.

Through these practices, Transformer extends engineering education beyond the laboratory into civic and everyday contexts. Upcycling becomes not only a sustainability strategy, but a pedagogical approach that embodies democratic values through material practice. In line with research on maker education as a democratizing force in technical learning (Blikstein, 2013; Martin, 2015), such low-threshold environments contribute to the creation of porous educational landscapes where technical knowledge, ecological responsibility, and civic participation intersect.