ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a potted history of how different currents of thinking in material culture studies can be applied to understand design culture and sets out suggestions for how to think about design's materiality. A lot of people therefore assert the importance of materiality to design and design anthropology work. The chapter provides a description of material culture in a design studio, to illustrate the kinds of phenomena which we need to understand and explain. The social life of design concepts illustrates how design culture is predicated upon material things. The notion of seeing design culture as flows of materials, making and consciousness is one way of circumventing the difficulties of the earlier ‘means and ends’ debates. The wave-like design materialities help form the cultural articulations between the lives of people and of things, shaping the degree of their engagement over time and the sense of fitness and appropriateness in contexts.
