PART 1. From Surface Choice to Material Literacy
For a long time, materials in design education were often approached through appearance, function and technique. Students learned how paper folds, how wood joins, how textiles behave, how plastic can be moulded, how metal carries weight, or how digital renderings can imitate surface and texture. These skills remain essential. But the meaning of materials is changing.
Today, a material is not only a surface, structure or finish. It is a set of relationships: to extraction, labour, chemistry, energy, supply chains, repair, reuse, toxicity, carbon, local culture and future waste.
For design students, this means that material choice is becoming a form of responsibility. The future designer must learn not only how materials look and perform, but where they come from, what they contain, how they age, how they affect people and ecosystems, and what happens when the product is no longer new.
Material intelligence is therefore becoming a core part of design literacy. It connects craft with science, aesthetics with ethics, and making with systems thinking.
Material Is Never Neutral
Every material carries a story. Some stories are visible: colour, texture, weight, smell, touch. Others are hidden: the chemicals used in production, the energy required to process it, the conditions of workers, the distance it travelled, the difficulty of recycling it, or the harm it may cause when burned, buried or broken down.
Design students are trained to make choices. But the basis of those choices must expand. It is no longer enough to ask whether a material is beautiful, affordable or easy to use. Students must also ask whether it is safe, circular, repairable, locally appropriate and transparent.
The point is not to find a perfect material. The point is to learn how to ask better material questions.
BE OPEN Insight
The future of design will not be shaped only by new forms, but by new relationships with matter.
As environmental and health consequences become harder to ignore, students need to understand materials as active participants in design. They are not passive ingredients. They shape how people live, how systems function and how future waste or value is created.
From Selection to Investigation
Traditional material education often begins with selection: choosing from samples, catalogues or supplier lists. Future material education will need to begin earlier, with investigation. What is the material made from? What is mixed into it? Who produces it? How far does it travel? Can it be repaired? Can it be separated from other materials? Can it return safely to biological or technical cycles?
This investigative approach changes the studio. Students may still build models and prototypes, but they may also create material maps, ingredient lists, lifecycle sketches, disassembly tests and end-of-life scenarios. They may compare not only how materials behave in the hand, but how they behave in a system.
Case Study: Materiom and the Rise of Bio-Based Experimentation
Materiom is a platform that supports the development of next-generation bio-based materials through open data and AI. Its work highlights a broader shift in design: material innovation is no longer limited to industrial laboratories. Designers, scientists, makers and producers can experiment with ingredients, recipes and performance data to explore new possibilities.
For students, bio-based experimentation can be especially valuable because it makes material systems visible. A material made from algae, mycelium, agricultural waste or natural binders reveals relationships between biology, chemistry, locality, performance and decay.
This kind of learning encourages students to ask practical questions. How strong is the material? How does it respond to moisture? Is it scalable? Is it compostable only under specific conditions? What additives are needed? Does it truly replace a harmful material, or does it introduce a different problem?
Source:
https://www.materiom.org
Learning Through Making
Material intelligence cannot be learned only from reading. Students need to cut, bend, break, join, stain, repair, test and disassemble. They need to see how materials fail. A material that looks elegant in a rendering may crack, warp, scratch, smell, fade or become impossible to separate from another component.
Material literacy is therefore not nostalgic craft. It is a future skill.