Elvin Karana

Foundations of Materials Experience: An Approach for HCI

A growing number of HCI scholars have started to take materiality as an entry point for acquiring a deeper understanding of the possibilities and constraints of design. Steadily moving beyond a distinction between the physical and the digital, a few have also started to look at materials as part of the unfolding of social and cultural practices. Yet, to date, relatively little is known about how these practices develop within the situated experience of materials, and how this situational whole can be supported by design. By contributing to both growing materiality scholarship and emerging practice-oriented approaches in HCI, this paper articulates a framework of materials experience that discusses how materials shape ways of doing and ultimately, practice, and how this is rooted in the experience of those materials.

On materials experience

A decade ago, in 2003, Denis Doordan published an article titled “On Materials” in Design Issues.1 His emphasis was on “how the material employed affects the form, function, and perception of the final design.” Accordingly, he suggested a new framework to discuss materials based on the following three terms: fabrication, concerning the preparation of materials for initial use; application, dealing with transformation of materials into artifacts; and appreciation, dealing with the reception of materials by users. During the past decade, the third term appreciation has lured attention in the materials and design domain, which has adopted a broader sense that corresponds with the experiences we have with the materials embodied in the artifacts around us. It refers to the mix of sensory (or aesthetic) appreciations, meanings, feelings, and thoughts that we have toward—or that are triggered by—a material, at any certain time and place. In this essay, we elaborate on the notion of the appreciation of materials and its wider implications. Our starting point is a simple observation: In the material infrastructure of today’s world, whether in products, buildings, or other creations, we see such variety of materials, driven largely by advances in technology. The layperson’s knowledge of these materials, in the sense that they are recognizable and identifiable, is probably at an all-time low.2 Similarly, new and emerging materials, along with the increasing demand to seriously adopt a discourse of sustainability, conspire to continually challenge the designer’s competence in materials selection. The morphological character of materials—as expressive as they are functional and structural—leads to the proposition of new forms and an experimental approach toward design.3 Materials are like words: The richer one’s vocabulary (in materials), the larger is the number of design solutions that can be seen and expressed.4 We argue that within the complexity inherent to materials and design—whether driven by technological or sustainability perspectives—users are the ones who determine the ultimate success (or not) of material choices. That is, success is a reflection of how people positively experience and react to the materials chosen by designers. A decade after “On Materials,” this essay elaborates on the topic of materials experience.5 1 Dennis P. Doordan, “On Materials,” Design Issues 19, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 3–8. 2 See Ezio Manzini, The Material of Invention (Milano: Arcadia Edizioni, 1986) for a foundational discussion on the abundance of new materials that has caused a shift in the relationship that people once had with materials, compared with previous eras of far fewer materials and finishes. 3 Paola Antonelli, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995). 4 Inna Alesina and Ellen Lupton, Exploring Materials: Creative Design for Everyday Objects (Princeton: Architectural Press, 2010). 5 This article is a considerably modified and extended version of the introduction to Elvin Karana, Owain Pedgley, and Valentina Rognoli, Materials Experience: Fundamentals of Materials and Design (Oxford: Elsevier, 2014).

HOW DO MATERIALS OBTAIN THEIR MEANINGS

Product designers are expected to create products transferring certain ‘meanings’. Materials of products are used for supporting the intended meanings in product design; one material may convey luxury, another material can be associated with a particular culture. Designers who aim to select a material that will contribute to the meaning they intend to convey in a product are confronted with the difficulty that the materials universe is immense. Moreover, traditional sayings such as ‘wood is cozy’, ‘metal is aloof’ or ‘plastic is cheap’ are less relevant and strict in today’s design practice. Without a doubt, having insights into the role of materials for creating particular meanings has become more and more relevant in the domain of design.

Assessing sustainability in nature-inspired design

In the field of sustainable product development, a new perspective for approaching sustainability has been advocated, challenging designers and engineers to aim beyond ‘reducing unsustainability’. Several design strategies – including Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle – have been suggested for developing truly sustainable, or ‘beneficial’, products. But do these strategies help in developing such products, and how to assess their ‘sustainability’? Based on a review of the objectives in nature-inspired design, we argue that assessing environmental sustainability is not straightforward. Whereas both Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle build on the perspective of ‘achieving sustainability’, current life-cycle assessment-based tools are geared towards reducing current impacts. As a consequence, existing tools are insufficiently equipped for the purpose of the assessment: they do not cover some of the main results that nature-inspired design is set out to accomplish. To be able to include these results, we propose two new constituents to current life-cycle-based product assessment: assessing against conditions of sustainability and assessing ‘achievement’, the extent to which these conditions of sustainability have been achieved. Furthermore, the product context needs to be included for assessing beneficial impacts. This article discusses how these constituents can contribute to an assessment tool that enables designers and engineers to assess the development of environmentally sustainable solutions.

Toward a New Materials Aesthetic Based on Imperfection and Graceful Aging

Novel materials tend to prevent all forms of change in time and acquisition of signs of aging, which may affect their ‘perfect’ aesthetic qualities. It would not be wrong to claim that technological developments, the predominance of automation processes and quality controls have led - and been driven by - a trend favoring the dominance of an aesthetic model tied to perfection in every sphere of human life: the body, the style of life, products, and their materials. Such an aesthetic model tied to perfection can only be obtained with brand-new products and it inevitably encourages the possession of a ‘new’ one even if the ‘old’ one is still fully functional. As stated earlier by the pioneers in the design for sustainability domains, following such an aesthetic model stimulating the possession of the ‘new’ is a great threat to sustainable development. Founded in these discussions, in this chapter we address the implementation of a new approach to material aesthetics, based on imperfection and graceful aging. We discuss how both of these concepts can be used as a medium to express naturalness and uniqueness, and how they can create added values that can evoke longer-term attachment to products.

THE EFFECT OF FORM ON ATTRIBUTING MEANINGS TO MATERIALS

Materials in product design used to be selected based especially on manufacturability concerns and technical aspects such as strength, conductivity, elasticity, etc. Nowadays, the increasing recognition for more intangible issues like meaning attribution or creating emotions in product design made designers shift their focus towards the intangible aspects in their materials selection activity as well. In this research, we aim to concentrate particularly on attributing meanings to materials. It is crucial to realize that several aspects (function, use, context, user, etc.) can be effective in attributing meanings to materials and they should be taken into consideration during the selection process. In this paper, we focus intensively on one of these aspects: the effect of form on attributing meanings to materials. The paper consists of four related studies exploring how people associate some forms with some particular materials and weather form can be effective in changing these ascribed meanings, or not.Copyright

Cradle to Cradle in Product Development: A Case Study of Closed-Loop Design

Cradle to Cradle (C2C) challenges designers to create products with a beneficial impact on environment, society and economy. While existing research has highlighted merits and critical points of the strategy, an understanding of its application -how Cradle to Cradle helps designers to develop such products- is lacking.

Assessing Material Properties on Sensorial Scales

Product designers are expected to create products transferring certain meanings. Materials of products are used for supporting the intended meanings in product design; one material may convey luxury, another material can be associated with a particular culture. It is to be expected that materials are attributed different meanings in different products and contexts, affected by certain key variables such as form, function, manufacturing processes, use, and user characteristics. The sensorial properties of materials (e.g. smoothness, transparency, softness, etc.) are one of these key variables which collaborate with the other key variables in design in order to create unique sensorial experiences and meanings. There is a growing interest among scholars in the design domain for developing new methods and tools to guide designers particularly in creating sensorial experiences through material choices. Studies conducted for this aim mainly focus on understanding the links between certain formal characteristics of materials (i.e. physical and sensorial properties) and the affective responses of users. The main question of this paper stems from this point: Can people properly evaluate the materials of products in terms of their sensorial properties regarding different sensory modalities? This main question is investigated by measuring the level of agreement among a group of non-design students on the sensorial properties of ten different materials. The results of the study show that perceptions of some sensorial properties can be more affected by the type of user-product interaction and by other sensorial properties (or other sensory domains). The paper consists of a comprehensive discussion on the results of the study.Copyright

Functional Demonstrators to Support Understanding of Smart Materials

The emergence of smart materials has urged design education to keep up and take part in introducing them to design students. There has been a great deal of work on teaching conventional materials like wood, metal and polymers in product design. Yet when it comes to learning smart materials, the sources are very limited. Our research group in Delft University of Technology has initiated a number of projects, particularly focusing on understanding technical and experiential characteristics of smart materials as materials of design. Our mission is to communicate smart material qualities through pre-design tinkering activities and functional demonstrators, which also serve as a source for inspiration. In this paper, we explain our approach through an example case on electroluminescent materials.

Designing Material Experience

Abstract If you aim to design a particular user experience, the material properties of the object may play a decisive role in being successful. Would the lightweight car door give you the proper impression of a luxury car? And does a perfectly polished doorknob feel natural? Maybe not. Materials can feel artificial, sound reliable, and (can make a product) look ‘cool’, they can be just pleasant to touch or look at, and cause us to experience disgust, admiration or surprise. In this chapter, we will look into these various ways in which materials can be experienced, ranging from the meanings we attribute to them, the aesthetic pleasure we obtain from perceiving them, and the emotions they may evoke in the context of a designed object. The goal of designing an intended (material) experience must be grounded in an understanding of the processes that underlie people’s material experiences more generally.