Features of material exploration projects emerged in design schools

With the updating and enrichment of the current design culture, design education is facing more opportunities and challenges. Material, as an important element of design, provides different ideas and creative paths for design education. These days, different kinds of material explorations and projects by students in design schools are attracting our attention – these emerging material-based projects with their meaningful storytelling show that design students are trying to build a comprehensive understanding of materials’ attributes and to view material through different lenses such as social, environmental and humanities. This paper will analyse the emerging material exploration phenomena in design schools, and try to understand its reason and importance in the current design and material education. It contains three parts: an introduction of the changing context of the material world and how this change has impacted design education, the explanation of analysis objectives and the methods, and the discoveries of the features in the selected material exploration projects. The research attempts to reveal that material exploration projects could cultivate design students’ ability to view and resolve problems from different perspectives and recognize their social responsibility required as designers today.