Foundations of Materials Experience

Abstract

A growing number of HCI scholars have started to take materiality as an entry point for acquiring a deeper understanding of the possibilities and constraints of design. Steadily moving beyond a distinction between the physical and the digital, a few have also started to look at materials as part of the unfolding of social and cultural practices. Yet, to date, relatively little is known about how these practices develop within the situated experience of materials, and how this situational whole can be supported by design. By contributing to both growing materiality scholarship and emerging practice-oriented approaches in HCI, this paper articulates a framework of materials experience that discusses how materials shape ways of doing and ultimately, practice, and how this is rooted in the experience of those materials.

Revived Beauty: Research into Aesthetic Appreciation of Materials to Valorise Materials from Waste

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“…We argue that the aesthetic universals in the materials domain may refer to the relationships between visual and tactile qualities in material appraisals. Subject to our experiences with and through materials [37,38] some assumptions are developed on how a particular material would feel when it is touched based on its visual qualities. In product design, the visual-tactile (in)congruity between visual and tactile sensations is known to elicit certain emotions such as surprise.…”

The Appraisal of Sustainable Materials

“…In her research Karana found that when users appraise a material, typically there is a link between use and associative descriptions, and manufacturing process descriptions and sensorial descriptions. Further, four experiential levels of material experience were identified, namely sensorial, affective, interpretive and performative (Giaccardi & Karana, 2015). The sensorial level refers to the phases in which users' sensorial modalities, i.e.…”

Material Tinkering. An inspirational approach for experiential learning and envisioning in product design education

“…The MDD method is a new methodology for materials exploration and design focusing on the notion of Materials Experience and combining practical experimentation, user studies and envisioning. Since materiality highly contributes to the definition of Product Experience (Desmet and Hekkert, 2007) the concept of Materials Experience arises as "the experience that people have through and with materials" (Karana, 2009;Karana, Pedgley, and Rognoli 2015), considering senses, meanings, emotions, and ways of doing (Giaccardi and Karana, 2015). A hands-on approach appears to be crucial in the MDD method to understand materials and develop them further.…”