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The purpose of this publication is to present a didactic concept with the targeted impact of a positive future vision. This paper reflects the effect of local educational action on the development of regionally optimised visions in rural regions of a European industrial state, compared with a rural region in the developing country of Senegal.

An assessment and analysis of two conceptual approaches to education and technology is conducted with a view to participating in a future multicultural participatory design process, and identifying the chances that communities have to build future‐oriented structures that support local roots and development.

In the short‐term, the technological and material results are the targeted localisation of a windmill in the (physical and cultural) countryside. In the long‐term, educative and social results are expected to strengthen local civil society, which is initiated by empowering students through their self‐responsibility in the Alpine region of Greifenburg, Austria. The “windmill” in the region is a publicly visible sign and a technology‐based icon in the landscape, based on local consensus on several levels and inspiring further regional consensus on energy, climate protection and its active creation through entrepreneurship in civil society.

Technology serves as a catalyst to trigger social cohesion among multiple cultures in a region and to enhance conviviality.

In this paper I explore how members of rural Maya households in central Quintana Roo (Mexico) interact with the wider social system and cope with long-term transformations in productive relations since c. 1840. Maya householders integrate elements of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. Through particular cultural forms they regulate internal uses of wealth and their relationships with the larger capitalist world. Social and economic stratification is a fundamental feature of life among Maya householders today as it was in the past. While disparities between wealth strata within the local context have increased, the community is far from disintegrating into antagonistic groups.