The NautICS Materials Workshop: Teaching and Learning Interactive, Connected and Smart Materials for Yacht Design

Knowledge about materials is a key element in design education, considering not only their technical properties but also experiential and expressive-sensorial qualities of materials. To comply with this transition and with the emergence of novel materials, educators need to adapt or develop new formats, tools and methods for teaching and learning materials in design curricula. This paper presents a tentative design methodology experimented and validated in an educational workshop named NautICS Materials, with the aims of (i) teaching ICS Materials in the absence of material samples, (ii) exploiting the potential of ICS Materials in driving yacht design concepts; (iii) designing for ICS Materials; and (iv) introducing and applying the notion of materials experience. ICS Materials is an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected, and Smart. Indeed, the domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increasingly technological advancement, which brings miniaturization of technology and material augmentation with the use of sensors, actuators, and microprocessors. Examples of new hybrid material systems with dynamic and computational qualities are increasingly emerging and raising the need to forecast their potentials in the design space and to reflect on their future application critically, both in design and in teaching. The workshop NautICS Materials -ICS Materials for the Nautical sector- is described by its objectives, structure, methodology, tools and results, in order to present a model to transfer to other sectors or to scale up in larger experimental and applied actions.