New ways of integrating material knowledge into the design process

Throughout resent years a constantly growing number of new materials have been developed,
presenting improved abilities or entirely new features. In the design studio context, this has led to the
emergence of physical material libraries, some for internal use and others entirely for external use in
order to help clients to find the right material among hundreds of samples. Furthermore a number of
material libraries have also been developed into online database, which provides detailed information
about new material and makes the information accessible from almost everywhere.
The access to material libraries and thereby access to information on new material possibilities has
also changed the way designers integrate knowledge about materials into the design process. This
means that the traditional design process model, where the selection of materials takes place after the
design of form and function – based on technical performance, no longer apply.
Accordingly the approach in this paper is to view information and knowledge about materials through
the perspective of organizational memory and technology brokering.
This paper is build upon two cases from the German based design studio: designaffairs GmbH, who
has two well-equipped material libraries. The study reveals how the designers use market and sociocultural
tendencies to select specific materials before the products form and function are designed.
This means that the selection is based on the visual and haptic qualities of the materials and not on the
materials’ technical data. One of the cases further illustrates three types of material search strategies,
which the designers apply in the early phases of the design process.