“Materials, of themselves, affect us little; it is the way we use them which influences our lives.” 
Epictetus, AD 50-100, Discourses, Book 2, Chapter 5

This platform is laser focused on materials and making within interiors. Materials driven design techniques are used to explore the performance, pragmatic and perceptive qualities of matter, and how these qualities inform aspects of form, detail and atmosphere. We encourage hands-on experimentation and direct contact with the outside world of design practitioners, manufacturers and makers.

The world’s most inspired concepts won’t keep the rain off our heads - a sketch-book may just about keep you dry as you run from doorway to taxi, but our buildings must be made of something. That something is materials.

Materials offer some of the greatest opportunities for creativity and innovation within interior design, and a deep understanding of materials and technology is one of the vehicles that allow us to deliver those elusive characteristics.

As designers we’re way past the perfunctory task of providing shelter. From the technological mastery displayed in Apple stores to the health promoting nature of Maggie’s Centers, the spaces we create should deliver so much more. They should tell stories, communicate values, be legible and allow the occupants within to flourish. Our spaces must also perform the functions for which they were intended. And it is through the use and manipulation of matter that our design intent will be ultimately manifested.

TITLE: MATERIALISING AN INTERIOR 

“Materials are essential for making the object that is a building, and through careful choices they can bleed over into the intangible, affecting the spaces created. This can be through performance and comfort, or more subtle through the creation of atmosphere and feeling.”

Rowan Moore, Why we build?

To materialise is to become actual fact.

What our buildings are made from determines how they look, age, feel and how they perform. Materials determine performance in both the pragmatic and social dimensions. Materials are the literal building blocks of an interior, the elements that our designed elements are composed of. It is this process of actualisation that this platform has explored.