Materials Library Featured in Book and Award-Winning Film

The Materials Library features in a brand new book that’s being launched today called Design Materials and Making for Social Change: From Materials We Explore to Materials We Wear.

The book is co-edited by Rebecca Earley (Chair of Circular Design Futures at University of the Arts London (UAL)), and Rosie Hornbuckle (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Complex Design Collaborations at UAL). You can read more about the book from the UAL team here.

Our book chapter is based on the fellowship research of our Materials Librarian Sarah Wilkes, along with her collaborator Caitlin McMullan, a Glasgow-based artist, researcher, and disability advocate. Cailtin and Sarah used the Materials Library collection to work with a group of amputees, exploring together how the materials chosen for something as intimate as a prosthetic limb not only impact on the functionality and comfort of their limb, but also dramatically affect the look and feel of it, with knock-on effects for the body image, identity and wellbeing of its wearer. 

You can also find out more about the project and its participants from the Sensory Prosthetics film, made with award-winning film-maker Dorothy Allen-Pickard. Material Bodies, the partner film to this one that was also inspired by our research, has featured in Nowness and won several awards.