Educating designers through Materials Club

Abstract

[EN] Material education is becoming a crucial element in the process of change that is involving the teaching in the field of design. The affirmation of fab labs in design education is increasingly manifested both in traditional classroom didactics and prototyping practices in studio. The growth number of fab labs in universities, have a high potential to change the original material didactics into participatory activities. Based on this situation, this paper aims to analysis how existing fab lab systems can be reframed to maximize benefits in the material education in design domain. As a result, we elaborate the concept of Materials Club as an enabling system to support design students developing their design projects with materials and being highly involvement inside the co-creative study community. In conclusion, Materials Club as an optimize of the fab lab system, can increase the effectiveness in material education. This scenario also promotes us to think about a universal method, which is valorizing the resources which already exist in university and integrate them in a virtuous system for reinforcing the design and material education.