Material Driven Design

This is a theme course of IPD theme 3: Materialising Futures.

As materials become alive, responsive and adaptive, and acquire new functionalities and expressions, how should designers work with them? How could they better understand and convey the potentials of such emerging materials for the interest of the planet and society? The Material Driven Design (MDD) Course is a didactic program with a strong focus on understanding and designing with emerging materials characterised by intricate temporal qualities.

This Course equips students with the foundational knowledge, tools, and techniques necessary for practising MDD, with a particular emphasis on the technical, temporal and experiential qualities of the material, while also uncovering their latent positive impact on sustainability.

The theoretical content of the course will be organised under 5 modules.

[1] MDD Method

[2] Understanding Material-Process-(temporal)Form relations (how to articulate Material Making Process and Taxonomy)

[3] Characterization of Material Temporality (how to capture, analyse, and anticipate change in materials)

[4] Experiential Characterization of Materials (how to explore material-people relationships)

[5] Vision in Material Driven Design (how to reflect on the purpose of the material, integrating sustainable thinking)