DESIGN & MATERIALITY
Cultures, Practices, and Meanings of Materials in Contemporary Design
Over the past few decades, design discourse has been shaped by the promise of the progressive dematerialization of the world. The rise of digital technologies, platforms, intangible services, and, more recently, artificial intelligence systems has reinforced the idea of a society grounded in the circulation of data and information rather than in tangible matter. This imaginary finds one of its most emblematic formulations in the reflections developed around Les Immatériaux (Lyotard & Chaput, 1985), where advanced modernity appeared to foreshadow a gradual emancipation from the material constraints of production.
Yet, precisely as the world increasingly represents itself as immaterial and digitalized, the question of materiality has re-emerged at the forefront of contemporary debate. As early as the 1980s, Tomás Maldonado challenged the presumed ecological virtues of dematerialization, arguing that technological development continued to rely on an ever-growing mobilization of material resources (Maldonado, 2013). Today, this observation appears more relevant than ever. The infrastructures underpinning global digitalization – including data centres, telecommunications networks, cloud computing, connected devices, and artificial intelligence systems – depend on vast quantities of energy, water, rare earth elements, metals, and other raw materials. The immaterial, therefore, does not replace matter; rather, it reconfigures its geographies, supply chains, regimes of visibility, and modes of extraction.