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  • New Materials and their impact on the material world

Oakley, Peter and Keuchler, Susanne, 2014, Book Section, New Materials and their impact on the material world Objects and Materials: a Routledge companion. Culture, Economy and the Social . Routledge, London and New York, pp. 82-91. ISBN 9780415678803

Abstract or Description:

This chapter focuses on an important yet neglected aspect of material culture: the appearance of new, made-to-measure materials that have begun to colonise the physical world. Within the social and historical sciences we have barely begun to theorize materiality beyond the fetish, an approach that ignores the full import of the material composition of objects. Everything we hold and everything we see takes shape thanks to materials, but it is the social identities we construct for materials that lead to their selection or rejection in manufacturing and influences the adoption or refusal by consumers of the resulting products. Through an exploration of the development and social reception of the first synthetic materials, material classification, and the relevance of the prototype to design practice, together with a consideration of how fully made-to-measure materials relate to these phenomena, we aim to present the reader with an outline of crucial changes that are reshaping the way we conceive of and interact with the material world.

Subjects: Other > Social studies > L600 Anthropology > L610 Social and Cultural Anthropology
Creative Arts and Design > W200 Design studies > W240 Industrial/Product Design
Creative Arts and Design > W200 Design studies > W290 Design studies not elsewhere classified
School or Centre: School of Arts & Humanities
Date Deposited: 31 Jan 2014 14:21
Last Modified: 09 Nov 2018 15:45
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/1615
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