Development of the material selection practice - a study exploring articulation of material requirements

This paper explores how the material selection matrix is used in a materials and sustainability course. The matrix encourages the students to articulate material selection requirements to become more competent in exploring new materials and selecting materials for a given design task. The study indicates that students focus on technical requirements when using the matrix and justifying their selection of materials.

This is surprising since the students attend an arts and crafts oriented design school and are encouraged and guided to consider non-technical requirements, as part of the course where the matrix is introduced. A possible reason for the undesired behavior could be that students are allowed very freely to define their own matrices, having only little guidance to which requirements to use.

A more formal procedure for making the material matrices is therefore proposed. The procedure requires students to use a fixed number of technical, experiential and sustainability oriented requirements.