School of Art and Design, Bath Spa University, Sion Hill, Bath BA1 5NA, UK.
Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci. 2013 Jan 28;371(1986):20110569. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2011.0569. Print 2013 Mar 13.
Emotional responses to materials and manufactured objects have a long history but provoked vivid writing during the design reform debates of the nineteenth century and were carried forward into the twentieth century. In particular, nineteenth-century anxieties about plasticity and about composite materials are still with us. Wood continues to represent sustainability, 'truth to materials', emotional durability and an assumed reassuring contact between material, tools and maker. By contrast, the facture offered by new media, in the form of self-replicating rapid prototyping machines, appears disembodied while also offering the possibility of homesteader-making. The desirability of recycling and up-cycling is currently central to our emotional responses to materials, with the world's waste dumps becoming sites of horrified fascination and inspiration. Symbolic moves in the direction of autarchy and reverse engineering by artists and designers register doubts about sustainability and seek to uncover the hidden impact of individual materials. This survey of historic and current attitudes towards materials and making processes by makers, artists and designers sheds light on anxieties familiar to us all, concerning technological development, authentic experience, agency, a sense of selfhood and the often bruising experience of modernity itself.
对材料和制成品的情感反应由来已久，但在 19 世纪的设计改革辩论中引发了生动的文字，并延续到了 20 世纪。特别是，19 世纪对塑料和复合材料的焦虑仍然存在。木材仍然代表着可持续性、“材料真实性”、情感耐久性以及材料、工具和制造者之间假设的令人安心的联系。相比之下，新媒体所提供的制造工艺，以自我复制的快速原型制造机器的形式出现，显得没有实体，同时也提供了自耕自作的可能性。回收和升级再利用的可取性目前是我们对材料的情感反应的核心，世界上的垃圾场成为了令人恐惧和灵感的地方。艺术家和设计师在自治和逆向工程方向上的象征性举措表明了对可持续性的怀疑，并试图揭示出个别材料的隐藏影响。制造者、艺术家和设计师对材料和制造工艺的历史和当前态度的调查揭示了我们所有人都熟悉的对技术发展、真实体验、机构、自我意识以及现代性本身的经常令人痛苦的体验的焦虑。
