Materials and Design: The Art and Science of Material Selection in Product Design

The history of man is recorded, recovered and remembered through the designs he created and the materials he used. Materials are the stuff of design, and today is not the age of just one material, but of an immense range.

Best selling author M. F. Ashby guides the reader through the process of selecting materials on the basis of their design suitability. He and co-author Kara Johnson begin with the assumption that products in a given market sector have little to distinguish between them in either performance or cost. When many technically near-equivalent products compete, market share is won or lost by the industrial design of a product: its visual and tactile attributes, the associations it carries, the image it creates in the consumer’s mind and the quality of its interface with the use and the environment.

Ashby and Johnson address the problem of selecting materials for industrial design from a unique viewpoint. They acknowledge that materials have two overlapping roles, in technical design and in industrial design. The technical designer has ready access to materials information. Industrial designers often do not have equivalent support.

Materials Selection in Industrial Design presents groundbreaking new information that, on one hand introduces engineering students to the principles of Industrial Design and to the idea that the selection of materials can directly affect the aesthetic qualities of the object. On the other hand they introduce industrial design students and practising industrial designers to engineering parameters through an accessible and holistic approach.

* Easy to use systematic approach to the selection and uses of materials

* Many excellent attribute “maps” are included which enable complex comparative information to be readily grasped

* Full colour photographs and illustrations throughout aid the understanding of concepts