Material Driven Design vs Crisis: Material Activism for a Harvest Society

Abstract

The current environmental crisis poses unprecedented challenges as systemic mega-risks for any society. To turn limitation of resources into an opportunity, which is an inherent sensibility of the discipline and practice of design, a productive, economic, ecological, and cultural shift in the use of material resources is necessary to enable the transition from a “plunder society” to a “harvest society”. A more holistic and thus systemic sustainable approach is possible if we consider material resources as commons by linking ecological issues to practices of sharing and caring within a limited resource system. Starting from the definition of material driven design, in the multiple interpretations that place material at the starting point of the design process, and through the analysis of case studies referring to bio-materials (bio-based), re-materials (recycled or upcycled), and neo-materials (experimental), which implement a material-based design approach, the aim is to prove how attention to matter becomes a centre of action for a “material activism”, in the sense of rethinking materiality as a collective and cultural practice, and for “becoming environmental”, in the sense of homeostatically regulating ourselves with Nature thanks to the artifacts we have built, without being afraid of them, because they are simply matter and energy.