The Role of Design in the Development of New Materials: Interview with Elvin Karana

Elvin Karanais an associatE Professor in the Faculty of In-dustrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology, where she founded and co-directs the Materials Experience Lab. Giving emphasis to the role of materials in design as experiential, and yet deeply rooted in their inherent prop-erties, Elvin Karana explores the produc-tive shifts between materials science and design to materials and product develop-ment in synergy. In 2019, she founded the creative bio-design research lab Material Incubator, which aims to the design of ma-terials that incorporate living organisms and to explore their potential to foster an alternative notion of daily life. Material Incubator brings together researchers and practitioners from Avans University of Applied Sciences and Delft University of Technology. In this interview, Karana talks about the emergence of the concept of ‘experiential characterization’, the need to expand our prototyping capabilities with emerging materials and the challenges involved in establishing the particular role design could play in materials development.