Eco material libraries as pedagogical infrastructures: recalibrating learning in biodesign education

Abstract

Biodesign education increasingly integrates living systems and biomaterials into design curricula, introducing material conditions that fundamentally reorganise how learning unfolds. This paper proposes that eco material libraries function as pedagogical infrastructures that stabilise material inquiry, mediate cross-disciplinary engagement and render ecological interdependence tangible. Drawing on eight years of situated pedagogical practice across two university contexts, it develops an exploratory conceptual analysis of how biomaterial samples operate as boundary objects within infrastructural arrangements that preserve iterations, breakdowns and process documentation. This infrastructural framing reveals how embodied material engagement recalibrates design epistemologies – repositioning learners as situated participants within material-ecological systems. Such recalibration has implications for challenge-based learning environments, where transversal competences are frequently presupposed but rarely explained. By demonstrating that such competences are enacted within organised material conditions rather than transmitted through instruction alone, the paper contributes a conceptual vocabulary for understanding how material environments shape learning trajectories in emerging biodesign pedagogies.