Material ecology

Abstract

The world of design has been dominated since the Industrial Revolution by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of standard parts framing the imagination of designers and builders who have been taught to think about their design objects and systems in terms of assemblies of parts with distinct functions. The assumption that parts are made of single material and fulfill predetermined specific functions is deeply rooted in design and usually goes unquestioned; it is also enforced by the way that industrial supply chains work. These age-old design paradigms have been reincarnated in Computer-aided Design (CAD) tools as well as Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM) technologies where homogeneous materials are formed into pre-defined shapes at the service of pre-determined functions.