Material Driven Design – When Matter Leads to Form

Over the last few decades most design educations have embraced digitalization and a more theoretical approach and largely steered away from previous craftsmanship-based approach to design and materials. This has opened up a new world of possibilities, but has also left designers with a lack of knowledge about materials.

Naturally a designer will never have the same deep understanding of materials as a materials engineer. However, the very limited material knowledge of most young designers effectively creates a barrier between the designer and the final product. A barrier that not only acts against the implementation of advanced materials, but also becomes a major obstacle in the creation of sustainable industrially produced products.

This Material Driven Design project focus on creating a design process that embraces the quantity and complexity of new materials and environmental challenges.

Contemplating that new knowledge about materials often emerges from fields not traditionally related to design it is necessary to rethink both didactic methods and physical installations.

Truly understanding materials and being capable of working with them creatively requires more than memorizing data and theory. Also, when the material is no longer a piece of wood, but has originated from the use of synthetic biology or has been grown utilizing bacteria.

Physically this way of working requires a space adapted to conduct hands-on material experiments in the triangle between art, natural science and technology, which is why the experiments of this project mainly takes place in the Material Design Lab – a space developed simultaneously with this research.

Didactically is requires methods that makes complex scientific knowledge understandable and usable in practice for design students.

This Material Driven Design project questions not just the way we teach materials, but the role of the material in the design process; experimenting with prioritizing matter over form with the expectation that this can lead to faster integration of new materials and more sustainable products.

Considering that all human-made materials that surround us are made from elements that are naturally occurring on our planet, it can be hard to understand how using these same elements in materialising and building our civilization could end up being so harmful to the same environment they came from.

When it comes to materials and sustainability it is always a matter of context. The most sustainable material can used or mixed in the wrong way result in a very unsustainable product.

Understanding how to design for a circular economy where a product has to either be recycled or biodegraded at the end of it’s life, demands a profound understanding of the composition and compatibility of materials.

A material driven design process ensures that the end product is recyclable and/or biodegradable and could therefor potentially play an important role in a change towards a circular economy.

The project is developed through experiments with a material driven design process mainly with designers and design students, but also with engineers, biologist, architects and scientist.

The approach to the material exploration and design is placed methodologically between art and science, and should therefore include both phenomenological sensory-based methods that traditionally are found in art and design and scientific methods involving experimentation, measurement and systematic observation.

The expected result of this project is to present a new material driven design process, that can be used by designers and in design education.

The results of the project and the individual experiments will be shared in articles and through networks with public and private companies and institutions.