Material as a story teller

The development of new materials and products makes the complex dynamics that regulate our behaviors, needs and expectations more visible and tangible (Krippendorff & Butter 2008). The material experience evokes ancestral feelings and impulses, laying its roots in the deepest layers of the individual, generating modes of immediate and multi-sensory narrative (Hekkert & Karana 2014). It can be said that design, by its nature, builds tangible, experiential and hypertextual stories about people's daily lives, placing itself within the narrative of our social, political and economic future (Sloane 2017). 

Polyurethane Foam as a metaphor

#1 Marsia

Marsia is a material experimentation carried out at the IPCB institute of the CNR in Portici. The project tells the identity of the city of Naples through a metaphor with a material, expanded polyurethane. This material is usually a functional filler, has no particular aesthetic appeal, is inexpensive and "bulky" in the sense that it is efficient in relation to its mass and thickness. Polyurethane is compared to the city of Naples, and represents its excesses and the raw and poor first impression of it. Chemical and artisanal manipulation operations are then applied to the polymer to restore its expressive identity, reducing it from a shapeless and bulky mass to a “skin” on which it is possible to read its true essence. Processes and ingredients generally used in chemistry laboratories are manipulated to mold new material possibilities of expanded polyurethane: isocyanates, polyols and colors treated with a hybrid approach that moves between scientific protocols and memories, redundancies and errors as elements of the city's DNA. The final artifact is a series of containers-vases made with the skin of this new experimental polyurethane, sewn to form primitive and simple shapes like cylinders.