Project outline

“It might be more helpful to imagine the world as a huge kitchen, well
stocked with ingredients of all sorts. In the kitchen, stuff is mixed together in various combinations, generating new materials in the process […]”
(Ingold, 2000)

Most material technologies emerging out of industry are specialized and inaccessible (Hecht, 2014). However, many projects have demonstrated that smart material qualities can be produced with limited means. Ingenious materials are often the result of material engagement and experience together with a dose of serendipity. With a basic conceptual model of material technologies, conventional materials such as silicone, natural granulates, and even wood can be rethought and reformulated exhibit such curious and responsive properties. In Achim Menges Hydroscope (2012), wood was crafted to changed shape in response to varying humidity. In uniMorph, material experience with printed circuit board fabrication (PCBs) led to the development of a programmable shape changing material (Heibeck et al, 2015).

“Phenomenon and instrument, object and experience, concept and method are all engaged in a running process of mutual instruction”
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2010)

Active Materials to describe a new technique of approaching matter an embodied and tacit way (Franinović and Franzke, 2015). Such an approach enables designers to develop an embodied understanding of materials, to create new forms of sensing and acting substances. Through this framework focus is moved from performance and durability typical of an engineering approach, to an emphasis on aesthetic qualities such as aliveness or ephemerality. While this framework acknowledges the importance of embodiment in creative material processes, it has not yet been extended to understanding the impact of space and arrangement on these processes.

The things that populate the space of a laboratory reflects the needs of the given field of research. However this curated space should also depict narratives and inspire experimentation. Much like the historical Wunderkammer, where knowledge was contained in associational representation of things. Therefore, we see the need for investigation and hands-on experimentation informed by the things populating a space. This arrangement of things should lie between the naivety of the Wunderkammer and the utilitarian nature of a contemporary material laboratory. We believe this to be an ideal setting for embodied learning, experiment and experiential developments in the field of novel materials.

References:

Menges, Achim: HygroScope – Meteorosensitive Morphology. Project Catalogue of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). pp. 21-24 (2012)

Elkins, James: What painting is, Routledge New York. p. 17. (2000)

Franinović, Karmen, Luke Franzke: Luminous Matter. Electroluminescent Paper as an Active Material. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement. p. 37–47. (2015)
Heibeck, Felix, Basheer Tome, Clark Della Silva, and Hiroshi Ishii: uniMorph: Fabricating Thin Film Composites for Shape-Changing Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 233-242. (2015)

Ingold, Tim: Bringing things to life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials. Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK (2008)

Hecht, Sam in Materials Experience: Fundamentals of Materials and Design. Karana Elvin, Owain Pedgley and Valentina Ragnoli. Publisher: Elsevier, Editors: Elvin Karana, Owain pedgley, Valentina Rognoli, pp.259-261 (2014)

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg: An epistemology of the concrete: Twentieth-century histories of life. Duke University Press (2010)