Objects, Practices, Experiences and Networks (OPEN Sig): Material-Enabled Changes in Design Research and Practice
Go backOver the last decade, we observe an ever-increasing interest in creating, tinkering and designing with new materials (Karana et al., 2015, Rognoli et al., 2015). Designers grow materials from living organisms (Myers, 2012) and create active composites by embedding electronics into materials (Vallgårda et al, 2016). These emerging materials and practices radically change the role of the designer from a ‘passive recipient’ to an ‘active maker’ of materials (Myers, 2012; Karana et al., 2015; Rognoli et al., 2015), as well as the way materials are experienced by people through their daily artifacts. And, practices of design and use in these areas create an opportunity to activate positive social (Drazin and Küchler 2015), environmental, economic and even political change.
- How do/will emerging materials advances affect practices around products from the designer and the user perspective?
- How is environmental, social, economic or political change activated through these new materials and material driven design practices?
We invite contributions that address these questions through material and product design cases, examples of methods and frameworks, and theory building, which focus on the following axis points:
Emerging materials: growing, recycled, bio-based, smart materials and material systems, alternative material resources, self-produced materials...
Material-enabled cultures around design and production: open science, co-design, customization, democratization of fabrication practices, repair, craft practices, closed-loop systems, DIY approaches, bio-hacking, collaborative cross-disciplinary working practices, resilience strategies, …
Emerging material experiences: sensory, embodied and affective experience, new material-driven practices, our relationships with nature and technology mediated by materials, new material identities and languages, new material contexts, virtual materials...
Indicative References
Drazin, A. and Küchler, S. (2015), The Social Life of Materials, London: Bloomsbury.
Karana E., Barati, B., Rognoli V., Zeeuw Van Der Laan, A., (2015). Material Driven Design (MDD): A Method To Design For Material Experiences. International Journal of Design, 9(2), 35-54.
Myers, W. (2012). Bio design. Museum of Modern Art.
Rognoli, V., Bianchini, M., Maffei, S., Karana, E. (2015). DIY Materials. The Journal of Materials and Design, 86: 692-702.
Vallgårda, A., Boer, L., Tsaknaki, V., & Svanaes, D. (2016) Material Programming: A New Interaction Design Practice. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems (pp. 149-152). ACM.
