SMART DESIGN: WHEN THE APPLICATION OF INTELLIGENT MATERIALS GIVE ITS CONTRIBUTION TO THE INDUSTRIAL DESIGN DEVELOPMENT

As the scientific development involves research on new intelligent materials, at the same time industry creates new applicable modalities to involve these discoveries. In particular, even if industrial design doesn’t work directly on material structure, its creative process also provides the hunting of new solution for technical usability problems or interaction with users. The possibility to organize and define the micro structural characterization of materials, or imprint some physical reactions is strictly correlate with the functional properties that industrial design is looking for. A new research program have been originated by the research collaboration between Politecnico di Milano, La Sapienza di Roma, the INSTM Consortium and the involvement of three reality linked with the Italian industrial district. Two of the industrial partners, Artemide and Danese represent the main Italian brands as regard lighting and furniture production, instead the third one, Saes Getters, is the worldwide leader for getters’ production and the use of shape memory alloys (SMA). The present work aims to describe innovative research on SMA and photo/thermo chromic materials’ application in the fields of lighting products and objects. Thus, to implement projects where material with added functionality and innovative properties are able to fulfill industries’ requests on differentiation and products improvement. Application of SMA becomes useful in the exploitation of environment conditions without electrical providing for lower consumption. Other implications could interest the use of materials that give a regulation of emitted light by shielding it just with thermal change conditions, or modify their aspects providing an immediate personalization according with users’ preferences. Other concepts that look with interest to this smart materials could evaluate new way of think about resizable products adapted for an easy and less expensive delivery or self supporting products with embedded surface treatments that avoid minor processing use for production costs decreasing.