This book presents a design-driven investigation into smart materials developed by chemists, physicists, materials and chemical engineers, and applied by designers to consumer products, buildings, interfaces, or textiles. Introducing a class of smart materials (referred to as stimuli-responsive, morphing or kinetic materials) that move and change their shape in response to stimuli, the book presents their characteristics, advantages, potentials, as well as the difficulties involved in their application. The book also presents a large number of case studies on products, projects, concepts, and experiments employing smart materials, thus mapping out new design territories for these innovative materials. The case studies involve different fields of design, including product, interior, fashion, and communication design. Reflecting the growing demand for sustainable and human-centered design agendas, the book explores and reveals the role and influence of these new materials and technologies on design and human experience, and discusses how they can be used to redefine our objects and spaces so as to promote more resilient environments. The book offers an intriguing and valuable resource for design professionals, engineers, scientists and students alike.

This book presents a design-driven investigation into smart materials developed by chemists, physicists, materials and chemical engineers, and applied by designers to consumer products. Introducing a class of smart materials, that change colors, the book presents their characteristics, advantages, potentialities and difficulties of applications of this to help understanding what they are, how they work, how they are applied. The books also present a number of case studies: products, projects, concepts and experiments using smart materials, thus mapping out new design territories for these innovative materials. These case studies involve different fields of design, including product, interior, fashion and communication design. Within the context of rising sustainable and human-centered design agendas, the series will demonstrate the role and influence of these new materials and technologies on design, and discuss how they can implement and redefine our objects and spaces to encourage more resilient environments.

What will we be made of and what will the world be made of? Science and technology are extending into design fields, modifying materials and everything that surrounds us, even our bodies, redefining on a perceptive level the boundary between things and us. To identify the actual evolution of the relationship between sciences, knowledge and design, in 2014 the Madec (Material Design Culture Research Centre) of Politecnico di Milano, initiated a wide debate with a series of contributions on innovation trajectories by well-known scholars across many disciplines, researchers, professionals and companies. This public debate, entitled 'Ideas and the Matter' has opened up new initiatives for design today, new ideas, and the definition of design approaches, contributing to the development of a new methodology of creativity-driven material innovation that, in a world full of opportunities but also problems to be solved, helps design to play a role in 'giving new meanings', through designing materials and objects with a critical approach. This is a mission from which designers cannot abdicate, following the success of "Design Thinking", which was an opening up to social innovation challenges and achieving creative solutions beyond the reach of conventional structure and method. At the same time, "Open Innovation" is a go-to process stimulating ways of creating positive change in production. This book is the compendium of Madec's one-year research. The contributors to the book come from many and diverse disciplines (medicine, biotechnology, engineering, art, anthropology, architecture and design), by which design thoughts are fed.