Materials for Design

INTRODUCTION

This book is for anyone interested in or involved in designing with physical materials. It is not a scientific or historical analysis of materials, but instead serves as an aid to understanding the current state of materials – which are the most commonly used and which are potentially the materials of the future. It embraces all areas of design and production, from products made as one offs to those mass-produced in the scale of millions of units per year, from highly desirable design pieces to some of the everyday objects that we take for granted. I first started writing about materials in 1999 and I stated then that we were only at the beginning of our exploration into this area: fourteen years later this still remains true, and ...