Articulating Material Criteria

This paper discusses the experiences and potentials with
materials teaching at the Institute for Product Design at
Kolding School of Design, using materials teaching as
experiments in my PhD project. The project intents to
create a stronger material awareness among product
design students with emphasis on sustainability. The
experiments aim to develop an understanding of, how
product design students include materials in their design
practice and how tools can be developed that further
enhance this. Hence experiments are essential for the
progress of the PhD project as they help to observe,
imitate and articulate the students’ inclusion of materials.
This paper particularly discusses the experiences made
and ideas generated after the execution of a material
science course for second year students, with emphasis
on the concept of the material selection matrix as an
educational tool for material exploration. The course
was the first course I was involved in as a PhD student
and has served as the first observation case in my project.
The purpose of this analysis has been to explore
and demonstrate that data from material selection matrices
generated during the course, help mature the tool.
Furthermore the purpose is to initiate a discussion on,
how to create educational tools for material awareness
creation in the design education e.g. by applying objective
and quantitative methods in an otherwise often subjective
design process.