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Her research focus lies at the intersection of history of technology, environmental history, and consumption history.

Heike Weber has worked on twentieth- and twenty-first-century everyday technologies such as household appliances and mobile devices. More recent publications focus on the history of reuse, repair, waste, and recycling (The Persistence of Technology. Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal, edited with Stefan Krebs), and Rethinking waste within business history (edited with Chad Denton). Taking an “envirotech” perspective, Heike Weber and her team at TU Berlin are exploring past sociotechnical shifts (e.g., in mobility, energy, resource use) as potentially “useable pasts” for future more sustainable transitions.

These studies have led her to wider research questions in the field of “discard studies.” Why, when, and how are machines, infrastructures, or artifacts eventually decommissioned, and what processes lie behind obsolescence? What practices and forms of knowledge are involved when industry, society, or individual actors scrap, discard, or abandon residues? Following technology’s path beyond innovation and use helps us to perceive the manifold and distinct temporalities incorporated in technology. Twentieth-century concepts of obsolescence, for instance, are related to temporal predications within innovation theories; material residues or ruins have become part and parcel of long-term engineering tasks such as remediation or aftercare for legacies.

Before coming to TU Berlin, Heike Weber was professor of the history of technology and environmental history at Bergische Universität Wuppertal (2013–17), then worked at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie. She was a guest researcher at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC) and the EHESS (Paris). She is currently active in the Association of German Engineers VDI and its history of technology axis.

Find out more about Heike Weber on the TU website.