HELLO MATERIALS BLOG

Glasses are basically made for vision correction or eye protection. But there is just much more to it. Glasses are no longer just glasses – and materials and technology play a huge role in this.

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Product families have a characteristic energy and carbon “footprint” – the consumption and emission over life. They also have a characteristic “fingerprint” – the way this energy and carbon is distributed between the material, the manufacture, the use and the disposal phases of product life. Understanding this fingerprint helps you understand how best to redesign the product or to change its use-pattern to reduce its energy consumption and emissions.

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These days at Hannover Messe an interesting material event is taking place:
Materials Café 2012 – A Materials and Design Exhibition Focused On Sustainability.

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There is a great untapped potential in already existing materials and technologies, but we need to improve at finding inspiration and solutions in the things that surround us.

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The Swedish ‘Form Magazine‘ has made a spring issue all about materials. They call it MATERIAL WORLD.

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“The impact materials are going to have in the future will be the way that we interact with surfaces or environments. It’s the combination of technology with materials that will be driving us…”

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… and to ad to this negative approach: product development can never be friendly to our planet either.

As a designer you might ask yourself: What if I just stop, sit down and do absolutely nothing for the rest of my life? That has to be environmentally safe. The sad answer is “no”.

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“Is not the most erotic place of the body where the clothing yawns?”
Roland Barthes

I choose this evocation of desire, the interstitial space between things, as a starting point to reflect on our surrounding spaces and their materiality. What motivates us to develop, produce and use (new?) materials to build and evolve our world.

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One of the most significant future transformations in the material sphere will be the development of a carbohydrate economy. This will be a global economy based primarily on renewable material feedstocks—as opposed to our current economy, which is founded largely on the consumption of nonrenewable feedstocks like fossil fuels.

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Why have materials become such a fascination for designers and why should there be an exhibition like the Hello Materials exhibition that looks into this area? It’s a good question to ask because with all the material libraries, databases that have sprung up over the world over the last 12 years we should take a moment to consider why in order to understand the future.

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