Concrete: Material Translation in Practice

Within the field of design, disciplines such as material design, material research, and material studies already work with materials as the focus of their practice. These disciplines are mostly concerned with direct material applications for the consumer sector and with material innovation. Material translation, a design methodology developed through this project, proposes a different approach to materials: making them, and the problems they create, more visible and understandable.

Material translation is a cross-disciplinary practice. It borrows the understanding-seeking aim of theory, the making methods of craft and design, and the communicative intent of art.

Addressing the climate crisis requires a radical transformation of the concrete industry. Solving the concrete problems extends beyond technical solutions; it also demands new ways of understanding and engaging with the material if we are to imagine a more sustainable future.

Issues related to concrete and its production have been grouped into three categories:

1. Enormous and ungraspable scale

2. Complex origins, existing between natural and human-made processes

3. Invisible or difficult-to-imagine impacts

Three pieces of data, one from each category, were selected and materially translated.

Data: By 2040, concrete mass is estimated to outweigh the entire Earth’s biomass. 

Material translation: physical comparison between 1 kg of concrete piece and 1 kg of local biomass (here: plants, fungi, and insects)

Data: Concrete is a process, not a material.

It is non-reversibly encapsulating water, sand, and gravel.

Material translation: physical diagram of the proportions of materials that make concrete. Later recasted in the same form into concrete and recycled concrete.

Data: Concrete is an anthropic rock.

Material translation: a collection of rocks representing the stages in the geological rock cycle that are related to concrete production. Redesign of the rock cycle (in translation process)