Understanding Emerging Materials and their Integration Patterns for Designing New Products with Enhanced Experiential Value

Material-driven design is a novel approach to product design starting with a thorough understanding of materials, unlike the traditional design process, which determines materials at later stages. Materials have been pivotal to research and practice, providing direction for materials that align with the product's design and enhance its efficient manufacturing. Material research continually advances to provide novel materials as superior substitutes for conventional ones and seeks the designers' collaboration to further their development. However, the material research continues to develop a wide range of materials with conventional applications. From an experiential-value perspective, the functional and experiential performance of these materials can significantly impact product design. Nevertheless, design literature has not adequately addressed the experiences with and for these materials, which means that designers' objectives do not completely encompass their applications and integration in design. This study first identified emerging materials in the natural sciences that hold significant potential for product design, and secondly, it acquired a comprehensive grasp of these materials via a design ideation workshop with designers and subsequent interviews with material scientists. Third, we utilized the insights from these activities to conduct a concept design experiment with design participants, aiming to explore the integration of emerging materials and the experiences they may elicit in product design concepts. The experiment's results provided valuable insights into our previous activities to understand emerging materials and their integration patterns in new product designs, with the aim of improving a product's experiential value and supporting its functional aspect in an envisioned scenario.