Angela Pablo
Material Collective
An online community for sharing knowledge about sustainable, eco-friendly design materials and processes.
http://www.materialcollective.org
Sustainable design is not just a better approach towards the environment, but it also speaks to designing for people's needs, making products accessible and providing fair working conditions. It's about looking at the bigger picture and understanding the overall effects of how we create, consume and waste. Materials play a significant role in the product life cycle; they're made up of natural, synthetic or recycled resources or a combination of these, they can inspire design, they determine manufacturing processes, and ultimately affect a product's durability and disposal.
New innovations are bringing forward a wide range of materials - a number of which respond to the situation we face with depleting natural resources. Designers have a unique challenge and responsibility to get creative with renewable and recycled materials. Many of these alternatives are still costly in terms of purchase and manufacturing, but if more widespread knowledge and use occurs, then the making these choices feasible for more products is possible. Curbing the appetite for consumption is a much larger task, but if we can look at what we're building products with now and consider better alternatives now, then we can really begin to affect the impact of the product life cycle's effect on our environment and ourselves.
Material Collective addresses sustainable design by providing an online resource built around community and sharing of knowledge. No one person or resource has all the answers as to what's sustainable or not, but my intent with this project is to rely on the expertise and experience of different disciplines to bring this knowledge to the table so it can be put to use. It's not only product designers who put goods out into the world, but the work of many - including, but not limited to the heads of design companies themselves, engineers, material manufacturers and so forth.
Material Collective will provide a framework to support a user-contributed knowledge base and forum to discuss relevant materials and processes, as well as showcase projects that demonstrate them in use. While many useful material reference libraries, books and websites exist, the advantage of Material Collective lies in its approach of sharing user-contributed content, and building off of each other's knowledge.
New innovations are bringing forward a wide range of materials - a number of which respond to the situation we face with depleting natural resources. Designers have a unique challenge and responsibility to get creative with renewable and recycled materials. Many of these alternatives are still costly in terms of purchase and manufacturing, but if more widespread knowledge and use occurs, then the making these choices feasible for more products is possible. Curbing the appetite for consumption is a much larger task, but if we can look at what we're building products with now and consider better alternatives now, then we can really begin to affect the impact of the product life cycle's effect on our environment and ourselves.
Material Collective addresses sustainable design by providing an online resource built around community and sharing of knowledge. No one person or resource has all the answers as to what's sustainable or not, but my intent with this project is to rely on the expertise and experience of different disciplines to bring this knowledge to the table so it can be put to use. It's not only product designers who put goods out into the world, but the work of many - including, but not limited to the heads of design companies themselves, engineers, material manufacturers and so forth.
Material Collective will provide a framework to support a user-contributed knowledge base and forum to discuss relevant materials and processes, as well as showcase projects that demonstrate them in use. While many useful material reference libraries, books and websites exist, the advantage of Material Collective lies in its approach of sharing user-contributed content, and building off of each other's knowledge.