Material tinkering

Material experience: awareness of the material

Valentina Rognoli, associate professor in the Design Department of the Milan Polytechnic, was one of the initiators of the change of course and the incursion into an area that until a few years ago was purely engineering.

Together with Elvin Karana, a professor at TU Delft in the Netherlands, he spread the concept of material experience thanks to Materials Experience Lab, a research group shared between the two universities and a platform for sharing knowledge, inside and outside the universities.

The starting point is the material, considered for its technical but also sensorial properties, as well as for its meanings, for the emotions it is able to transmit and to evoke as well as for its evident and implied performance.

“The material can become the privileged access door to a different design awareness that considers it as the starting point of the design process”, explains Valentina Rognoli. “Thanks to its disruptive expressive force that dialogues with the artefact, the material is a fundamental element, as is repeatedly demonstrated by some examples of Italian design”.

Companies have often been a mediation tool in the introduction of technological innovations. Companies and laboratories are the spaces where design and engineering research met for the first time and began to dialogue.

Tinkering innovation: no waste starting from the home kitchen

With the advent of maker culture, even the more experimental aspects of materials research returned to the focus of designers, favoring a hybridization between design, biology, materials science and engineering.

It is no coincidence that one of the few companies that has transformed a mycelium-based material into a product distributed on the market was born from the stubbornness of Maurizio Montalti (his story here and the latest news on his tech holding here), an engineer who studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

“Recently” explains Valentina Rognoli, “designers have begun to design and modify materials, above all starting from a thought of sustainability.

Those who were simple users have become creators and central players in the design and industrial progress of new materials that could contribute to the sustainable transition that mankind must make in order to survive".

Tinkering for research and experimentation

The Tinkering part carried out in an academic context has an important empowerment function.

The designer who approaches the idea of being able to 'manage' methods of experimentation and collaborative action with an active attitude with an elementary chemistry and common ingredients, is the designer who observes the relationship with the matter.

This is how research and experimentation converge, merging different knowledge to generate new materials and new ways of thinking.

The taxonomy of DIY Materials

Material Tinkering starts from an individual or collective creative search for new materials, using formulas similar to culinary recipes, thus creating DIY materials.

Professor Rognoli's research group at the Milan Polytechnic used these approaches and generated, thanks to the research of Camilo Ayala Garcia, a taxonomy inspired by the nineteenth-century one of Linnaeus strong>, dividing them by origin: animal, mineral, vegetable.

As well as two new categories: salvage and hybridization with technology.