Glass

The invention of new materials has radically altered the options available for designers. From the whiteboard, projector, tables, chairs, stationery, computers and clothes in this room it is easy to see that the dynamic and new world of plastics provides a good terrain on which to observe the complex relations between invention and innovation. For designers, plastic is an infinitely versatile material, which easily takes on complex forms—a material with the veiled potential to be pulled, squeezed, foamed, injected and sandwiched; one which calls for a different technical culture.

In his book ‘The Material of Invention’, Ezio Manzini talks about materials in transformation, with plastic being the most parallel. He compares trying to capture a snapshot of materials to taking a group photograph where everyone is in a constant state of movement. This analogy easily communicates the difficulty of trying to capture not just the essence of a group of variable materials but also how to record them. From a different perspective French literary theorist, Roland Barthes, describes plastic as, “more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible.”

Humankind worked hard from the earliest times to develop materials which would offer benefits not usually found in natural products. The development of plastic materials started with the use of natural materials with plastic properties (e.g., chewing gum, shellac) then evolved with the development of chemically modified natural materials (e.g., rubber, nitrocellulose, collagen) and finally the wide range of completely synthetic material that we would recognise as modern plastics.

Although plastics have been ar...

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...o the products that are derived from it. The image of plastic is often accompanied by the representation of cheap, shiny products, or disposable packaging, however, when we think of landfill sites, we think of plastic products rather than the material itself. Plastic suffers from being too good at its job, from being used without any sense of what will happen to the material when the product is no longer useful. All of these materials, however, entered production directly with mass-market applications.

As a material of such innovation and forward thinking, in this day and age, the quote by Norman Mailer in the Harvard Magazine states it simply, “I sometimes think that there is a malign force loose in the universe that is the social equivalent of cancer, and it’s plastic. It infiltrates everything. It’s metastasis. It gets into every single pore of productive life.”