Ecological Materialities: Exploring the Entanglement of Nature, Design, and Technology in Contemporary Materials

The essay proposes an analytical and operative framework for designing future materials. It discusses emerging materiality’s ontological and methodological identity through the stance of recently established post-anthropocentric theories and practices and the authors’ design explorations. It shows the experiments, prototypes, and reflections arising from ongoing research projects to discuss the crucial role of design in establishing practices and perspectives on the materials of our surroundings informed by natural behaviors and enhanced by digital technology. This study critically reviews and juxtaposes different aspects of the authors’ projects, Breath, A Grain of, and Future Archaeologies, to summarize the reflections and directions. The projects investigate the concurrence of nature and design in creating and altering the built environment and propose digital technologies as the medium to design new opportunities for it. We adopt cross-disciplinary methods and speculative practices of research through design, scientific sampling, microscopic observation, and archaeology-inspired processes. This essay derives directions and opportunities for designing material systems based on the entanglement of natural and artificial, human and nonhuman, and informed by the implicit logic of ecology.