Material activism. New hybrid scenarios between design and technology

Our material experience (Giaccardi & Karana, 2015) is, thanks to the materials, artifacts and objects that surround us, a conditioned experience. It is ruled by the fact that everything we enter in contact with, come from an industrial mass production. That is to say that our material experience is based mainly from industrial materials that have been developed to be coherent with shapes efficient in a mass productive system. This is the result of decades and decades of development of the industry and will not change in the immediate future (Rognoli et al., 2015) although other remarkable phenomena are emerging. We have witnessed in the past 15 years an exciting change of scope when it comes to the understanding of the relationship between design and technology in a contemporary world. Materials influence tremendously that relationship back and forth as they are embodied in everyday artefacts through mass production. We are surrounded by industrial materials industrially processed. There are two main established forces that drive materials development: On one side we have the search for solutions to the technical/technological problems in strategic sectors like medicine or military, and on the other side the research of more affordable materials solutions that can be scaled up easily to fulfill industrial demands (Lindstrom, Razavi & Nobell, 2014). This established forces of materials development are starting to see a third one coming that is going to establish as well; the one that deals with bio-based materials development to fulfill environmental affairs.