Materials Profile Project
Material Profiles
To design intelligently and responsibly with materials, in aid of sustainability, calls for substantial knowledge about their origins, uses, and fates. Taken literally, this is an impossible task, because the materials of interest to buildings are so varied and disparate. This program’s resolution of this dilemma is divide up the task into significant but manageable portions for individual and small group research and writing, and to arrange for the different parts to come together into an integrated package in the end.
Five Families of Materials, Fifteen Subfamilies
Three Life-cycle Phases
We, as a program, will investigate five key families of materials—wood, metal, concrete/earth, textile, and plastic. Most important building materials, past, present, and future, fall into one of these families. The principal omission is composite materials, which are very important and we will take up in Winter Quarter.
Each material family is itself large and varied. To respect this variety, we will investigate three subfamilies for each family, for example, steel, aluminum, and copper for metals. Each subfamily is itself quite broad, but we will content ourselves with this level of subdividing.
For each subfamily, one needs to consider the three key life-cycle phases—upstream, design/use, and downstream.
If you do the math on this breakdown, there are 45 distinct topics for study. With 42 students in the program, this leads to two 9-student teams and three 8-student teams, each working on one material family. Within each family, there are 9 topics (three subfamilies, three life-cycle phases), so each student is primarily responsible for one topic, and three teams need to cover one extra topic among their 8 members. We will post a big sign-up grid for people to choose which topic in which family they want to handle.
Schedule: Brick to Wall to Building
A: Preliminary gathering of resources (1 week): each person locates book titles, journal article titles, and Internet URL’s which bear on their topic. QQQ how much? Due Friday, October 6, 5 pm (submit by e-mail).
B: Research and writing of statement on individual topic (2 weeks): each person reviews information, gathers additional information as necessary, and writes a 900-1500 word statement on the characteristics of their subfamily of materials in their phase of the life cycle (e.g. upstream phase for concrete, or design/use phase for thermosetting plastics). Due Friday, October 20, 5 pm (submit by e-mail). We will treat these as “revise and resubmit” papers: we will return them with comments and suggestions, and you will write a final version, due along with the writing for Part C.
NOTE: people working on the same life-cycle phase in a given materials family can probably help each other greatly in this research and writing: sharing out search tasks, and sharing results could save much time and greatly improve results here.
C: Merging of topic statements into subfamily reports: people responsible for the three life-cycle phases for a given subfamily share topic statements, background research and references; based on this, each person a well organized, coherent report that profiles that subfamily in a unified way, and in the author’s own words. This is also a “revise and resubmit” paper; final version due at end of part D. Length: 2100-3600 words. Due Friday, November 3, 5 pm, along with final versions of individual topic papers (submit by e-mail).
D: Merging of subfamily reports into unified profile for whole material family: Each 8 or 9 student group is responsible for producing a final report and PowerPoint presentation, based on the subfamily reports from part C.
It is up to the group how to organize the work of merging the subfamily reports into a unified final document, with suitable introduction and conclusion, unified writing style and references, and so on. It is not required that everyone take equal part. Some groups may wish to divide work equally, but that is not required. Others may have one or more members who wish to do the extra writing, PowerPoint prep themselves. We will acknowledge extra work of this kind in our evaluations, without prejudice to group members who do not volunteer. The report should make clear who authored which portions. The only shared responsibility is to find some effective way to produce a good final report and presentation.
Report length: 6000-9000 words. Consider the main audience to be future Sustainable Design students looking for a solid, informative, accessible introduction to the family of materials.
The PowerPoint presentation should be a text and graphic digest of the family report suitable to play unattended during the day of final presentations (Tuesday, December 5). Consider the audience to be typical people attending the aannual Synergy conference on this campus (this year, on April 20-22, 2007).
The due date for the finished report and slide show is a few days earlier, to allow undistracted time for finishing the Design Recycle project. Full family report (printed) and slide show (on disk) due Thursday, November 30, 3.30 pm, along with final version of subfamily report.
The Subfamilies
METAL WOOD CONCRETE/EARTH TEXTILE PLASTIC
steel softwood concrete plant origin thermoplastics
aluminum hardwood brick animal origin thermosetting plastics
copper bamboo unfired earth synthetic adhesives
Some Hints
§§ start early: it saves a lot of time
§§ work together: two or three people can follow a lot more leads than just one, and have a lot richer idea which leads to follow, as well as helping really understand the information you uncover. Share your idea and findings: everyone benefits.
§§ be realistic about writing time: you know whether you are fast, medium, or slow at this. So count back a suitable number of days from the due date, and start writing then, even if you have a few more things to track down or understand before you’re really finished.
