Materials sovereignty: Pathways for shaping nanotechnology design

Abstract

People in contemporary industrial societies encounter countless novel materials that did not exist previously, many of which present risks to health and environment. In this article, we build on the concept of “materials sovereignty” as the right of people to use and be surrounded by environmentally benign, non-toxic, and renewing materials in their everyday lives. As a rights-based approach, materials sovereignty may help change the politics of governing materials. We suggest that social movements that explicitly base interventions into design on materials sovereignty may be better able to gain traction in changing industrial production. We consider the case of nanotechnology as a particularly challenging field for social movement intervention. We review several pathways that have been used by social movement organizations in attempts to influence the development of nanomaterials, but which have met with limited success. We more closely examine three participatory pathways through which social movements could intervene more directly into material design: participatory technology assessment, collaboration with industry, and co-design. We identify three key elements of materials sovereignty: participatory knowledge systems, which create multi-directional flows of knowledge and agency; the embedding of citizen voices into design processes; and building accountability systems. Of the pathways we examine here, co-design appears to be the most promising from a theoretical and ethical perspective, but there remain significant institutional and organizational challenges for bringing it into practice.

Green Design Tools: Building Values and Politics into Material Choices

“…Pharos is a web-based tool that provides curated information about chemical substances from a large number of public sources, including information about toxicity, industrial use, and independently researched information about the chemical makeup of over a hundred categories of building products (HBN 2020). The US-based organization HBN originally developed Pharos as an information intervention (Kokai and Iles 2020) into the building products market: HBN believed that if designers could easily learn about the material hazards and environmental impacts of specific building products, they could more clearly express the green building sector’s market preferences for safer products to manufacturers.…”

Study the Exposure of Low-Level Laser on rGO/Ag NPs to Improve the Antibacterial Activity of Different Types of Bacteria

“…High chemical stability, extreme mechanical strength, and exceptional electronic and thermal conductivity are just a few examples of unique properties. As a result, it has a wide range of applications, including supercapacitors [4][5][6], solar cells [7], sensors [8], and catalysts [9]. It is still a brilliant star on the horizon of materials science [10].…”