Inclusive education on low-tech for a sustainable future

Following an increasing awareness of society, the youth in particular, regarding environmental and climate challenges as well as a demand for social justice, higher education institutions need to ...

LT4SUSTAIN’s objective was to raise awareness of low-tech among European teachers and students through open hackathons and to provide them with the skills to undertake entrepreneurial adventures on sustainable solutions. Our objectives included improving students' awareness of the low-tech ecosystem, aligning education with resource, environmental, and climate challenges, and designing replicable territorialised hackathons. All of that while improving inclusiveness in the design and appropriation of technology, facilitating LowTech knowledge established in educational modules and supporting entrepreneurship in frugal innovation and ecological transition. The collaboration among the partners of the project ensured the appropriation of LowTech open knowledge topics for established innovation/entrepreneurship courses and teachers taking into account different cultural contexts in Europe. LT4SUSTAIN opens the discussion on sustainable design and the role of entrepreneurship towards an ecological just transition. The LowTech Handbook produced, proposes a framework to address the current socio-ecological challenges with sustainable societal and technological solutions based on a model of strong sustainability.

The main activity of LT4Sustain was the successful implementation of an open European LowTech Hackathon for students from different socioeconomic, cultural, epistemological and language backgrounds. Such activity was an intense week of learning, designing and proposing LowTech solutions to real problems in the city of Chalons-en-Champagne. The problems were identified after a long process of sociological analysis of the city. After a few months, since we established the first contact with the city, we were really to provide the participants of the hackathon with the contact of the different territorial actors of Chalons-en-Champagne. In collaboration with the city administration, the metropolis administration, non-profit associations, education institutions, local businesses and citizens, we were able to generate a safe space for the participants of the hackathon to freely explore, analyse and provide solutions to different challenges in the city. The students had to propose their solutions in front of a jury that chose the best solutions. The jury was made of experts on LowTech, and local stakeholders from different sectors of society. The European Hackathon was paired with a Multiplier Event, for which we brought 11 high-level academics, practitioners and experts on the development of LowTech to give talks, workshops and keynotes on different approaches to the LowTech framework. Both activities were open to the general public for free. With more than 200 participants during the 8-day event, we successfully triggered discussions, projects and positive changes in the metropolis of Chalons-en-Champagne. We also organised 3 more multiplier events (ME) in the city of Grenoble to gather feedback from the participants of the work we were producing at the time. The first ME was dedicated to gathering feedback on the first analysis of the literature and best LowTech practices we considered as the pathway for the development of our pedagogical tools. The event was held in a hybrid form and helped us define the gaps we had in our analysis. As a result of the ME, we managed to establish a panel of external reviewers, that later on revised and gave us feedback on the work we were doing. The second ME was a hybrid event focused on gathering the feedback of our reviewing panel and external stakeholders of society on the pedagogical modules, that then became the chapters of our LowTech Handbook. The event was crucial to finishing the design of the modules. The third ME was held at the end of the project, in order to disseminate the results and gather potential new pathways to continue developing research in education towards a LowTech approach, and the next steps after the end of the project. We held 4 local hackathons during the project, one in U Mons, one at TU Dublin, one in ENSE3 and one at UTT. Those local hackathons provided different kinds of feedback from the students participating. It helped us test our methods, frameworks and delivery of the chosen activities. Those activities also provided clues on how to integrate the LowTech framework in the existing curricula of students of different disciplines (engineering, design and management) and education levels (bachelor and master).