Design for meaningful materials experience: A case study about designing materials with rice and sea-salt

Abstract

Material could elicit meaningful user experiences in and beyond its utilitarian assessment. For designers, they are required to qualify the material not only for what it is, but also for what it expresses to, what it elicits from, and what it guide people to do. To find out the answer, designers need to guide the development of materials by experiential goals. In this paper, we will first introduce material experience as our theory foundation and explain the importance of meaning contribution for materials. In the design phase, we are following an innovative design practice with natural materials to create experience. The method we apply is Material Driven Design (MDD) which could facilitate designing for material experiences. In the end, we will analyze how materials experience be generated through innovative design practices.