Shifting to Design-driven Material Innovation

This essay is published in the book Ideas and the Matter, edited by Marinella Ferrara and Giulio Ceppi. The book presents the founding research undertaken by the Politecnico di Milano’s Material Design Culture Research Centre (Madec). Founded in 2014, Madec obtained the Design Department’s support during its first year by being granted the Fondo di Ateneo per la Ricerca di Base (FARB 2013) for “Fundamental/Foundational/ Exploratory Researches that are strategically assessed for scientific growth in a research department”. In the third section of the book, scientific discourse focuses on the Material Design Culture and changing approach in term of the evolution of research methods. In this chapter, the author analyses several changes in the design discipline and in the approaches to Material design and explores the new dimension of the contemporary trend of material innovation driven by design competences.