Materiality

The notion of materiality is relevant for the discussion of habitats for many forms of life, including humans but also mosses, birds and others.

Materials

What are materials? (inert, chemically active, living, important and less important, composite and simple, etc.)
How much is there and where are they distributed? (land, water, air, surfaces, Moon, asteroids, living bodies, etc.) Anthropocene: human-made materials now weigh as much as all living biomass, say scientists (theconversation.com) Statistics. 1
Where do they come from? (cosmic, geological, biological, industrial processes)
Who and how uses them?
How do they matter for living beings and living cultures?
How do they change with human impact and into the future?

Examples:

Industrial
Dirt, soil, living tissue, dead tissue...

Topics and Issues

Biomaterials
Materials for devices
Materials for energy and catalysis
Materials for optics
Nanoscale materials
Soft materials
Structural materials

Reproducibility

Hüpkes, Philip, and Gabriele Dürbeck. ‘The Technical Non-Reproducibility of the Earth System: Scale, Biosphere 2, and T.C. Boyle’s Terranauts’. The Anthropocene Review, 2021, 20530196211048936. https://doi.org/10/gpqgx7.

Approaches

Material Science

Engineering and Design

Material Ecocriticism

Oppermann, Serpil. ‘The Scale of the Anthropocene: Material Ecocritical Reflections’. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 51, no. 3 (2018): 1–17.

Material Practices: The Anthropocene Earth in Formation | MPIWG (mpg.de)

Cycling of Materials

Waster of human industry, recycling, upcycling, etc.

Steel from old tyres and ceramics from nutshells – how industry can use our rubbish (theconversation.com)

And overview of landfill mining:

Krook, Joakim, Niclas Svensson, and Mats Eklund. ‘Landfill Mining: A Critical Review of Two Decades of Research’. Waste Management 32, no. 3 (2012): 513–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2011.10.015.

Retention

Technofossils are Future Fossils that Tell the Human Story (quharrison.com)

Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Colin N. Waters, Anthony D. Barnosky, and Peter Haff. “The Technofossil Record of Humans.” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 34–43. https://doi.org/10/ggk2bd.

Types and Groups

Stone

Edensor, Tim. Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality. Singapore: Springer, 2020.

Plastic

References

A general introduction into material science:

Callister, William D, and David G Rethwisch. Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction. 10th ed. 2000. Reprint, Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.

An attempt to link back to design:

Ormondryod, Graham, and Angela Morris, eds. Designing with Natural Materials. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2018.

On the cumulative significance of human-made materials:

Dijkstra, Joris J., Rob N. J. Comans, Jeroen Schokker, and Michiel J. van der Meulen. ‘The Geological Significance of Novel Anthropogenic Materials: Deposits of Industrial Waste and by-Products’. Anthropocene 28 (2019): 100229. https://doi.org/10/gpqgwd.

Footnotes

Elhacham, Emily, Liad Ben-Uri, Jonathan Grozovski, Yinon M. Bar-On, and Ron Milo. ‘Global Human-Made Mass Exceeds All Living Biomass’. Nature 588, no. 7838 (2020): 442–44. https://doi.org/10/fmzv.˄

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