The development of new building materials has decisively influenced the progression of architecture through the link between built form and available material systems. The new generation of engineered materials are no exception. However, to fully utilise these materials in the design process, there is a need for designers to understand how these new materials perform. In this paper we propose a method for sensing and representing the response of materials to external stimuli, at the early design stage, to help the designer establish a material awareness. We present a novel approach for embedding capacitive sensors into material models in order to improve material performance of designs. The method was applied and tested during two workshops, both discussed in this paper. The outcome is a method for anticipating engineered material behaviour.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.