Designing responsible material cultures

Abstract

Material is the first and ultimate substance of any design process. Never than ever today’s material evolution has to deal with the strong changes in cultural, epistemological and social conditions requiring a new balance. Similarly to Glaucus’s metamorphosis, we will have to accept to lose some parts of our contemporary way of designing to gain a new capacity to address climate change and bio diversity loss from the very beginning of our projects. The idea of this chapter is that the action is urgent and can be done through a new responsible material culture capable to design innovative material systems which are precise, thanks to computational tools, but also care at environmental and human impact. This emergent scenario needs a new figure of designer between bricoleur and engineer.