A Material World…

… it’s not just the lyrics of a Madonna song; it’s a reality of life, and one I think people would be  better off if they understood at a more personal level.  Basically, the world is made up of 1) materials that can’t be replaced (minerals for example) and 2) those that can (as in a tree).  And we use them both, at what seems like an alarming rate.  I saw a chart recently that estimated when the known supplies of a number of materials would be depleted,… used up, gone, eliminated from our global supply.  What’s really scary is that some of these materials hit their ‘end point’ just decades from now.  What is equally scary -- actually frightening -- is that there’s actually a third group of materials that hardly ever go away,… those materials we create, but never get fully consumed – the by-products of our material world.

But I’m convinced that materials innovation holds the promise in all three of these areas.  I was encouraged by a Global Innovation Forum we held last week  where marketers, engineers and designers from across the globe came together to discuss new materials and their unique application.  We talked about innovative ways to use materials that were destined for a land fill (steel mill scale called slag; powder paint overspray).  We talked about new materials that could replace the need to use those in limited supply (exfoliated graphite nanoplatelets, now that’s a mouthful).  And we talked about utilizing materials that grow naturally in the environment (such as the use of bamboo fibers, which can grow to full height in a couple of months).  It was heartwarming to see how seriously everyone was addressing the challenges before us.  It’s one of those design problems that we own together.

Our guest speaker at this Forum was Blaine Brownell; an architect, researcher of materials, and sustainable building advisor with NBBJ in Seattle.  A great speaker, a good guy, and he brings lots of props,… which make his talk super interesting.  He showed us totally green materials, repurposed materials, materials that serve double duty (e.g., structure and art), and many more.  You can find all of these in a reference book called Transmaterial that he edited.  It’s divided into sections – Concrete, Wood, Plastic, Rubber, Glass, etc.  In the forward to the book, Blaine puts the pace of material innovation (which he calls a Revolution) in perspective by suggesting it is a widely held belief that more new materials or material applications have been developed in the last twenty years, than in the entire history of material science prior to the last twenty years.  Now that’s amazing.

Of particular interest in Transmaterial are the seven categories/classifications which define the inventory of new materials.  They are ultraperforming, multidimensional, repurposed, recombinant, intelligent, transformational and interfacial.  It’s the last grouping, interfacial, that I would like to focus a bit on,… as it has a direct impact on the types of work spaces we are exploring.  Interfacial materials, as Blaine defines them, bridge the physical world and the virtual world.  It is at the heart of many of our research experiments, as we seek to find better ways for individuals and teams to interact with networked-content within a physical setting.  This is based on the premise that the unlimited content available on/across the internet doesn’t translate to useful information until it becomes in some way physical.  This could be on a screen, a wall, a table, in space.  The environment is, in effect, the canvas upon which digital bits are painted.  Holographic glass is both physical and virtual, depending on it its use.  Is it material…?