Expanding Territories of Materials and Design

People’s experience of materials, regarding their here-and-now and possible futures, is largely bound into complex accounts of how materials are mobilized in the design of artifacts. The first volume of Materials Experience, subtitled Fundamentals of Materials and Design (Karana et al., 2014), focused on describing people material relationships, with the central premise that materials experience can be viewed from the perspective of the designer who creates artifacts and from the perspective of people who own and interact with those artifacts. In this second volume, we have drawn upon our observations of how materials experience as a concept has evolved and been mobilized to incorporate new ways of thinking and doing in design. We have subtitled the book Expanding Territories of Materials and Design, encompassing a critical perspective on the changing role of design/designers, the increased prevalence of material-driven design (MDD) practices, and the increasing attention among design scholars to the role of materials themselves as active and influential agents within and outside design processes. Materials Experience 2 is therefore a companion to the first volume. In this introductory chapter, to benefit readers venturing into the field of materials experience, we first provide a concise account of where materials experience originated from, alongside its main concepts.