This study reviews literature on the aspects of material selection within the field of industrial design education, specifically focusing on existing material selection tools and guidelines used in industrial design education. The growing number of materials available today has created a large variety of options for industrial designers, which they are ill-equipped to handle. A key reason behind this is that industrial designers lack appropriate education in material selection. There is a large body of research in the field of mechanical engineering, examining the material selection process of mechanical engineers. There are differences in material selection activities of mechanical engineers and industrial designers, based on their information requirements during different stages of the design process. Recent research highlights a need to merge the perspectives of engineering and industrial design for teaching the subject of material selection in industrial design education at tertiary level. Industrial designers have unique skills to combine technical properties and intangible characteristics of materials in the product development process. Design students need to learn how to act as ambassadors of the intangible material characteristics in material selection processes in interdisciplinary teams. Industrial design needs to reclaim material education when taught in technical faculties and develop its own curriculum. An open-minded dialogue with the engineering colleagues is a prerequisite in developing a curriculum for material courses in design education at a technical faculty. Together designers and engineers need to define a mutual understanding of concepts and contexts to successfully develop a new curriculum. This paper suggests an approach that prepare the students to work both on inspirational and analytical levels in material selection processes.

This study evaluates a new pedagogic approach implemented in material courses for product design students at bachelor level education. Material education within the field of design education at technical faculties has, in general, a strong technical focus, e.g. selecting materials with predominant focus on engineering properties of materials. Product design education at a bachelor level need to offer material courses that prepares the design students to work both on inspirational and analytical levels in material selection processes. Early in the design education, students often have a preconception of materials, and they need to be introduced to an open-minded inspirational material selection process, based on scientific design methods. When developing a new curriculum for the material courses, it is important to teach materials and production methods in a contextualized setting with emphasis on how materials can be approached in a design process. Methods can be seen as mental tools that aids the design students in navigating complexity and offers them a structure to deal with unfamiliar territories. After an evaluation, we selected some methods, guidelines and tools to integrate in the mandatory material courses for the product design students e.g. the Expressive-Sensorial Atlas, Meaning Driven Materials Selection and the Material Driven Design method. The implementation were made in two steps in order to test, evaluate and further develop a framework for teaching materials courses to product design students. This study only reports the first step of implementation since the second step is under development and will be implemented during autumn 2017.

The aim of this study is to evaluate a new pedagogic approach implemented in a compulsory materials course for product design students at bachelors level at Malmö University. When developing a new curriculum for the material course, a decision was made to teach materials and production methods in a contextualized setting with emphasis on how students can deal with materials in a design process. Methods can be seen as mental tools that aid the design students in navigating complexity and offers them a structure to deal with unfamiliar territories. After an evaluation, some methods, guidelines and tools were selected to integrate in the compulsory materials course for the product design students, e.g. the Expressive-Sensorial Atlas [1], Meaning Driven Materials Selection [2] and the Material Driven Design method [3]. The implementation is made in two steps in order to test, evaluate and further develop a framework for teaching materials courses to product design students. The study evaluate the first step of implementation in general, and the implementation of the Material Driven Design method in particular. It is hoped that this research can contribute to further development of pedagogical approaches for teaching materials and production methods in a contextualized setting for product design students at bachelors level.

This qualitative case study aims at understanding when and how industrial designers, working in design consultancies, engage in activities that will influence material selection in the design process. While the extant literature presents material selection processes as a sequence of activities aimed at finding candidate materials, there is paucity of research on material criteria activities. Formulating material criteria is an activity that is performed during all design phases and they become clearer and more complete throughout the project. For the case studies, explorative semi-structured interviews were conducted with five industrial designers with 10 years of work experience or more. The results suggest (a) that risk management has a major influence on the material selection process, (b) that negotiations of project boundaries in the ‘fuzzy’ pre-design phase has crucial influence on the risk management aspect of the material criteria activities, and (c) a lack of awareness that design briefs usually outline material criteria expressed as sensorial characteristics, which are later translated by engineering into final material criteria used for the material selection process.