“Perceptions” versus “Conceptions.” Mapping materials between memory, responsibility, and technology.

This paper starts from the problems related to cataloguing materials for design, which opens the way for subsequent categorization processes, while identifying the conceptual filters needed to make this step. Memory, responsibility, and technology are those chosen by the authors as screens for conceptualizing in a different way the perceptive properties of the materials made available by the now vast literature currently existing on “material experience.” The question, therefore, is: how can perceptive aspects of materials take on logical structures – mapping in fact – that differ in accordance with the conceptual filter or category that is used? In what way can these categories transform the neutrality/naturalness of the perceptive/ sensory characteristics of materials into interpretative processes with those same characteristics as a necessary condition for the project? All this is the case if we wish to credit what was recently stated by Giuliana Bruno, according to whom speaking today of materiality means representing the transformation of matter and the movements of the mind as interconnected phenomena (Bruno, 2014/2016 ). The authors aim to demonstrate, through specific case studies, how the movement between memory, responsibility, and technology leads to different transformations of matter, producing different organizations of perception. Starting from the same, common material, in the specific case paper and its derivatives, the filters chosen by the authors highlight this transition from perceptions to conceptions as a methodological strategy, as model zero, in order to organize a national dialogue on the design of materials in relation to the nascent Design4material network being formed in Italy.