Monday 04 February 2019 – Lunchtime seminar with Dr Valentina Rognoli (Design, Politecnico di Milano)

Speaker: Dr Valentina Rognoli (Design, Politecnico di Milano)
Hosted by: Professor Daniela Petrelli
Title: New materials practices: The DIY-Materials

A new approach to materials has emerged in the international design scene. Designers are choosing materials not only from material libraries, from suppliers or from the companies who commissioned the project. The designer today is more and more aware that innovation is also coming from direct experimentation with the materials. It is in fact through several experimentations and tinkering processes where many self-productions of materials occur. We called this phenomenon DIY-Materials. It denoted the designer’s contribution to the development of the material and to the tune-up of the manufacturing process. From the research of the raw sources until the low-tech machinery developed for the production of the material, the designer has complete control of the process.

To better define this phenomenon, we proposed a classification based on the typologies of resource involved in the development of the material. The classification is inspired by the taxonomy subdivision of nature proposed by Linnaeus in the XVII century. We have defined five kingdoms of DIY-Materials, and for each one, we identified several case studies allowing a better understanding of the whole phenomenon.

The presentation aims to define the DIY-Materials, explains the kingdoms classification and
shows the most relevant cases studied taken from the professional design context as well as from the academy highlighting the opportunities that such practices represent for the future of the design
discipline.

1.00PM – 2.00PM
MONDAY 04 FEBRUARY 2019
CANTOR 9020a

Dr Valentina Rognoli is an Assistant Professor at the Design School, Politecnico di Milano. She has been working in the field of materials for design for almost twenty years gaining expertise on this topic both in research and education. She has always been interested on the expressive-sensorial dimension of materials and their experiential aspects. At present, her research and teaching activities are focusing on: DIY-Materials for social innovation and sustainability, Speculative Materials, Materials for interactions and IoT (ICS Materials), Tinkering with materials, Materials Driven Design (MDD) method, CMF (colour, material and finishing) design, materials and education, emerging materials experiences, repairing and imperfection, materiality between design and food. She is co-head of the Materials Experience Lab and one of the editors of Materials Experience: Fundamentals of Materials and Design.