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This book provides instrumental theory and practical guidance to bring materials back into a central role in the design process and education. It reinforces the key role and responsibility of designers and encourages designers to take back control over the ideation and manufacturing process.
List of contents
Introduction 1. Sustainability and making 2. Materials in design education 3. The material dialogue in craft 4. Reintroducing materials into a contemporary design process 5. Implications for design education 6. Sustainable design: knowing how
Index
About the author
Mette Bak-Andersen is a Danish designer and researcher. She was educated as a designer in Barcelona and holds a PhD from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Since 2008 she has explored ways to bring back materials into the design process, both in her design practice and in educational projects with design students, as well as in her doctoral research. In 2013 she founded the Material Design Lab at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology, which she directed until 2018.
Summary
This book provides instrumental theory and practical guidance to bring materials back into a central role in the design process and education. It reinforces the key role and responsibility of designers and encourages designers to take back control over the ideation and manufacturing process.
Additional text
This book unveils the systemic challenges in the world of design, a discipline directly entangled with the current ecological crisis and social disenfranchisement. Our current material ecology is threatening the equilibrium that makes life possible on this planet, and the deep reflection in this book gives hope to the discipline and the practice. Design education requires a much-needed update on sustainable values, in addition to new digital tools for design, to achieve the purpose to nurture all life on this planet, not only human, and this means changing our material ecology." – Tomas Diez Ladera, Director of Fab Lab Barcelona, and the Master in Design for Emergent Futures at IAAC
"Design movements evolve over time. The last 150 years have seen the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Bauhaus, Pop, Modernism, Postmodernism and more. Each has influenced product design and architecture. And each has had it chosen set of materials – woods, leathers, metals, ceramic, glass, concrete, plastics – that have shaped the sense and feel of the object created with them.
The digital age has provided unprecedented access to information and to modelling tools. Much engineering and design teaching now centres around them. This greatly-widened horizon stimulates innovation, but its sheer scale has tended to cloud the close relationship that designers, in the past, had with their materials, replacing intimacy with a few by a passing acquaintance with many.
This book is a wake-up call, an appeal to educators to bring closeness to materials back into a central role in the design process and education. It is timely: the current concern for the well-being of present and future generations requires that materials be chosen in ways that are better informed about the environmental consequences of their use than at present. And at a human level, the materials of the products that surround us, if well chosen, bring an aesthetic satisfaction that is life-enhancing." – Mike Ashby, Emeritus Professor of Materials, University of Cambridge, UK
"This book is a must-read for anyone interested in how materiality can be brought back into the center of design education" - Mark Miodownik, Director of Institute of Making, University College London, UK
