Conclusion
This thesis investigates adopting and selecting bio-based materials as a crucial step toward sustainable product development. It highlights the importance of combining technical perspective and experiential qualities, which engineers and designers have traditionally explored separately. Engineers focus on tangible factors such as cost, tensile strength, and manufacturability, while designers emphasize intangible qualities such as sensory appreciation, meanings, and material identity. This disconnection has limited the holistic understanding of emerging materials and creates more challenges to the widespread adoption of bio-based alternatives.
The research developed and tested a novel material profile tool that integrates technical properties with experiential qualities. Through material explorations and workshops involving design and engineering practitioners, the study identified shared and different approaches to material selection. It revealed barriers and opportunities influencing bio-based material selection. These findings provide insights into bio-based materials challenges faced in product development and propose a multidisciplinary approach to material characterization that combines the two perspectives as equally important.
Practical Level
The tool facilitates discussions on adopting bio-based materials without considering cost constraints. For instance, the opportunity to forget production costs allows for exploring alternative pathways to make bio-based materials viable. By separating the decision-making from this constraint, designers, engineers, and manufacturers can explore new perspectives and identify opportunities that align with the growing interest in sustainable options. However, these discussions remain at a general or initial stage because, in reality, materials production costs are crucial.
Conceptual Level
The tool emphasizes integrating technical and experiential perspectives to foster dialogue between design and engineering practitioners about the potential of bio-based materials. These discussions were mainly carried out by introducing experiential properties as qualities shaped through human interaction with materials or products. A limitation of the tool and the integration of the two perspectives is that presenting experiential properties poses challenges. These properties are difficult to understand through descriptive text alone without physical samples or visual aids.
Pedagogy Level
MATERIA, the proposed tool, offers a framework for holistically evaluating materials and facilitating informed decision-making in design and engineering contexts. By addressing technical and experiential dimensions, this tool aims to support the adoption of bio-based materials, ensuring they meet technical performance demands while considering user and societal values. While constraints remain a significant barrier, fostering deeper conversations and exposing practitioners to tools like the one proposed in this research can inspire innovative solutions to advance the selection and adoption of bio-based materials.
Future Opportunities
The goal will be to refine the tool into a practical material selection resource that bridges technical and experiential properties to support material decision-making. The next iteration must enhance usability through simplification and incorporate physical samples or visualizations to make the tool more intuitive. MATERIA opens different avenues for future development. For example, it could evolve into a material tool template or open-source software platform that characterizes materials based on technical and experiential properties or teaches how to do it. In this example, a challenge to overcome is that experiential properties are highly subjective and context-dependent.
The tool's adaptability could be expanded to academic and professional settings. In academia, it could serve as a teaching resource for sustainability education, helping students—from early academic stages—understand material selection through a comprehensive lens that includes the two perspectives on material characterization. The tool as a teaching resource would foster a deeper appreciation for sustainable practices and holistic material selection.
The tool could act as an exploratory and communicative resource in professional contexts, providing practitioners with a different perspective on material selection. By emphasizing the role of human interaction in shaping experiential properties, the tool can facilitate discussions and decisions regarding bio-based materials selection and adoption with a different lens.
The continued evolution of MATERIA and its approach can foster discussions on advancing bio-based materials selection and adoption as part of the transition to renewable resource-based materials within product development. By addressing current challenges, expanding usability, and integrating into educational and professional workflows, the tool could promote a more holistic approach to material selection.