NEXT GENERATION BUILDING MATERIALS The 21st century faces a radical change in how we produce construction materials – a shift towards cultivating, breeding, raising, farming, or growing future resources. This book presents innovative industrialized production methods for cultivated building materials, like cement grown by bacteria, bricks made of mushroom mycelium, or bamboo fibers as reinforcement for concrete. Spanning from scientific research to product development and architectural application, this book builds a bridge between the academic and the professional world of architecture. The book describes the challenges, strategies, and goals in the first part, followed by a second part on bamboo, A cultivated building material and a number of examples in the third part which form the bridge from cultivated materials to building products.

There is broad acceptance across the Humanities and Social Sciences that our deliberations on the social need to take place through attention to practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the affective dimensions of human sociality. This Companion focuses on the objects and materials found at centre stage, and asks: what matters about objects? Objects and Materials explores the field, providing succinct summary accounts of contemporary scholarship, along with a wealth of new research investigating the capacity of objects to shape, unsettle and exceed expectations. Original chapters from over forty international, interdisciplinary contributors address an array of objects and materials to ask what the terms of collaborations with objects and materials are, and to consider how these collaborations become integral to our understandings of the complex, relational dynamics that fashion social worlds. Objects and Materials will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities, including in sociology, social theory, science and technology studies, history, anthropology, archaeology, gender studies, women’s studies, geography, cultural studies, politics and international relations, and philosophy.

Takes place in the fall of 1989 then the spring of 1991 in a small town at the edge of industrial Weston in the northeast (a composite locale in Pennsylvania). Part 1, Fire in the Dark, relates the story of high school senior, hothead, and soccer star Maryl ODonnell and her conflicted relationship with Millervilles hunky linebacker, Derek Teaberry. Their families were friends until tough times forced a wedge between them. Maryl tangles with Dereks younger sister, who is injured in the incident, and Derek pushes Maryls twin, Megan, into an intimacy she did not want. A series of events, culminating in a fire at the ODonnells small business, results in Maryl being suspected of conspiring to collect insurance money. Her often-violent responses to pressure dont help, and memories of her part in a childhood kidnapping cloud her judgement. Maryl must enlist the help of her nemesis, Derek, in uncovering who is behind the fireswith a long-ago death as the key to solving the mysterywhile the real culprit seeks to avenge one tragedy with another, the life of a talented young goalkeeper. Part 2, A Shot in the Dark, finds Maryl at the end of her freshman year at a small college. On a scholarship, Maryl tries to find a balance between academia, athletics, and recreation; in addition, she must maintain a part-time job and keep her boyfriend at bay until the time is right . . . and then the past intrudes, in the form of the young man she helped put in jail who has been released and wastes no time making her aware of it. A ghost appears from the past, further complicating matters. Faced with choices she never asked for, Maryl must choose between helping someone she thought was lost to her forever, keeping her scholarship or her personal integrity, and in the end, protecting herself from a terrible fate.

Design Anthropology brings together leading international design theorists, consultants and anthropologists to explore the changing object culture of the 21st century. Decades ago, product designers used basic market research to fine-tune their designs for consumer success. Today the design process has been radically transformed, with the user center-stage in the design process. From design ethnography to culture probing, innovative designers are employing anthropological methods to elicit the meanings rather than the mere form and function of objects. This important volume provides a fascinating exploration of the issues facing the shapers of our increasingly complex material world. The text features case studies and investigations covering a diverse range of academic disciplines. From IKEA and anti-design to erotic twenty-first-century needlework and online interior decoration, the book positions itself at the intersections of design, anthropology, material culture, architecture, and sociology.

In the mid-1960s, artists like Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Lynda Benglis began to experiment with formlessness in their materials. The maxim Form follows material," however, was not only proclaimed in the era's avant-garde art: it had a distinct impact on furniture design as well--for example, on Gunnar A. Andersen's experimental polyurethane Portrait of My Mother's Chesterfield Chair of 1964 and Zanotta's famous Sacco beanbag chair of 1968. Edited by Peter Noever, Director of Vienna's MAK museum of applied and contemporary art, this volume is the first to concentrate on formlessness in furniture design. Featuring work from the 1960s through today by such revolutionary figures as Frank Gehry, Gaetano Pesce, Ron Arad and Karim Rashid, it illuminates connections between the historical avant-garde and the applied arts, and tracks the various manifestations of design formlessness to have emerged over the past half century--from Robert Dean's 1967 Sea Urchin chair to today's computer-assisted "blobjects.""