There is an urgency to discuss materials in relation to design and sustainability. To effect change and respond to the ever more present challenges of global climate change and resource scarcity, we need a radical change in the way we understand, design, and build our environment. Architecture and design discourse increasingly instigate new material practices: across the globe and in the Nordic countries, new initiatives from academia and practice question how we can change the way we design for a better, more sustainable and more environmentally conscious future. However, results remain dispersed and difficult to discuss outside of a case by case perspective. Theoretical discourse tends to retain a positivistic, technology-led, and solution-oriented outlook that limits our ability to question underlying historical, philosophical, and broader socio-cultural frameworks of materials.
This project aims to create a new research group of interdisciplinary partners from architecture, design, and the arts, with special interest in materials, history, aesthetics, and sustainability. The research group connects theorists and makers in a broader discussion of how creative practice, critical histories, and arts-based research can inform overarching sustainability discourse within the field of architecture and design. By bringing together academia, practice, and cultural heritage institutions, the group will establish a conceptual framework and theoretical discourse of materials in order to understand how critical thinking can drive design practice towards a rethinking of its material practices.
