Modes of Collectivity in Materials Research

In the past decade, a lively abundance of experimental materials research evolved in and around international arts and design school environments. Emerging from mainly formerly commodity focussed design disciplines such as Industrial, Textile, and Fashion Design, students and lecturers put their attention to the design of materials in order to develop approaches of unlearning exploitative relations with matter and to find new modes towards responsible making. While the projects do not lack of critical material thinking, deal with more-than-human agency, and engage with for example accessibilities of resources, material cycles, handson methods and substitutions of petroleum-based plastics, modes of connecting material experimentations to the social-political realities of their implementation outside of the educational environment or art market are still rare