
The dematerializing and rematerializing of design
The article begins by considering design in relation to the rising environmental awareness in the decades since its beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s. Increasing environmental awareness has accompanied what several thinkers have noted to be a paradigm shift in values, as they come to
embrace process, variability and experience in lieu of progress and material goods. Given the beginnings of such a shift, and given the goal of shifting the world away from one based on material consumption, there is a need to shift values. The article suggests designers need to change their
thinking away from offering total, complete solutions isolated from the natural world towards designing with the forces and energy flow of nature. At the same time, artefacts can play a role in shaping values, taking into account immateriality – forces and energy – and experience.
Liquid Sky is presented as an example of how designing with the vagaries of the natural world might instil appreciation and change values. Liquid Sky is a window installation that amplifies the changing light and airflow conditions, using them to paint the domestic interior in an animate display
of light. The artefact itself is an incomplete armature, which is completed by the interrelationship of material (textile) and immaterial (sunlight and air movement). Liquid Sky offers an example of how artefacts can instil the unpredictability and endless variations characteristic of the
natural world, and how – through materializing the immaterial – artefacts can co-shape our values and thinking regarding an ecological future.
No Reference information available - sign in for access.
No Citation information available - sign in for access.
No Supplementary Data.
No Article Media
No Metrics
Keywords: air movement; daylight; ecological sustainability; experiential design; immateriality; product design; window shade
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: 1: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia 2: Monash University, Australia
Publication date: 01 February 2013
The aim of Craft Research is to advocate and promote current and emerging craft research, including research into materials, processes, methods, concepts, aesthetic and style. This may be in any discipline area of the applied arts and crafts, including craft education.
- Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Intellect Books page
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites