New Materials and their impact on the material world

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