Design for New Materials and New Manufacturing Technologies

Designing new materials introduce new challenges – from the setting of materials physical characteristics to the project of their cultural identity. Such a complex challenge is being embraced by many designers in the present, however, this comes to a price. The large number of materials is already problematizing the traditional modality of direct experience upon them. For example, the traditional systems for classifying materials, commonly referred to as “material families”, struggles to incorporate some new materials’ unusual and contradictory properties. But also, technologies are characterized by a great dynamism and rapid evolution. This poses significant challenges but also great potential for the design of our future physical world: from the ecological to the social one’s.