● Material Designers

Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering (ES)

Politecnico di Miano (IT), Ma-tt-er (UK)

State of the art

The environmental sustainability sector is normally approached from technical disciplines only (such as materials engineering), but the creative and cultural industries have the talent and perspective that bring a more user-centric, systemic vision.

Description of the project

MaDe addresses the training and exposure of new materials designers towards a better circular economy, their positive impact in the industry and the generation of a new design discipline and creative job profile that addresses environmental sustainability. 120 material design formulations that promote new material solutions made out of waste or of excess resources, for instance, resulted from the project. In addition, 120 European designers were trained over three European cities with the skills to deliver positive environmental solutions through materials. These material design projects, designers, articles and scripts from experts in the European environmental sustainability ecosystem were covered in the MaDe Book. Furthermore, materials design projects that deal with creating new industrial processes, new socioeconomic impact at local level, new entrepreneurship initiatives and new visions for the future of fabrication were rewarded by the MaDe Awards.

What if we used creativity to provide better circular economy solutions through the ideation of new materials ?

Creative Europe’s support

The project has allowed the generation of a transnational, European IG platform with a growing number of followers. Partners will use it to continue training and consolidating the role of materials design in environmental issues.

#design #circular economy #materials #capacity building

Beyond Environmental Sustainability

Materials design projects developed within the project were evaluated on their environmental impact through the study of composition, the number of production steps, and on the energy involved. The conclusion was that new practices, derived from a creative discipline, can be generated to impact new greening industrial initiatives.

Contact

www.materialdesigners.org Creative Europe Project Results