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Does matter matter?

For Design

Matter is the primary element of design. And if too much matter kills matter, no matter at all can kill design. Indeed, creating things (objects, places, services, even digital…) demand material resources. For now, we persist in extracting natural resources to build new things but soon, a material crisis will force us to create less or not at all… This will mark the end of nowadays Design, as there would be no matter to work on anymore. Therefore, Design needs to reinvent itself in order to learn how to create only the essential and create new things only by working with resources that we already have, things that were already created. In oceans, in landfill sites, at home… Unused objects are everywhere and will still be for some time before they disappear (and plastic decomposing into small particles is not disappearing). They only ask to be used for new purposes: building houses with old wheels and local earth, clothes made out of leftovers of curtains or furniture fabric… So yes, matter matters for Design, and there is an incredible Design potential in recycling matter!

 

Alternative materialities

Can matter be replaced by something nonmaterial? Service design works in this direction, enabling the exchange of services rather than goods. And information Design even more, as it aims to share only information which is unmaterial. But in a materialized world, with material entities with material needs, material resources are still necessary to make services run and to spread information. Maybe in some future, we manage to dematerialize all the world’s genetic and cultural inheritance into something else than matter. But for now, the approaching data crisis won’t allow storing all this in massive data centers as resources will lack to run these centers, and even if we manage to store it into DNA, isn’t DNA matter as well?

Fortunately, there are more and more alternatives to overcome material negative consequences: apple-based leather sofas for Cassina, human and animal detritus like hair or excrements, fungi grow-it-yourself furniture or architecture, mycelium (fungi) packaging (see picture), an herb-based textile dye to benefit the skin and the environment, ink made out of captured carbon emission, furniture using industrial waste and bio-resins, like this expanding foam chair, plant root weaving

 

By design

Now that we have seen that matter can be used in many different ways to avoid wasting it, what can we say about the social potential of matter? The pioneer materialist feminist Simone de Beauvoir once said “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” to explain that people are not defined by biological and psychological factors, but by what society makes with it. Could we say the same of things? The matter that was used for an industrially manufactured, as much as for a fungi-based lamp, is not born as a lamp, it evolved and became one through the process that its environment had on it and still has. Things, like people, reflect the making of society and act on the making of this society simultaneously. Therefore, things and their design are considerable tools to make societal changes. So yes, designed matter matters for society.

 

design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself) – Victor Papanek (Design for the real world, 1972)

 

 

(https://www.grown.bio/mycelium-packaging/)

1 reply to “Does matter matter?”

  1. smclauch says:

    Great post Emilie, beautiful imagery which adds further interest to your post .
    Shirley

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