We are surrounded by materials. Organic, synthetic, processed, raw, edible, composite, durable, degraded, living, dead. They are the building blocks of our homes, the clothes on our bodies, the cream on our skin and the food we eat. They are not only around us, but also within us. They become part of us and are excreted from us. They rub off on us and we rub off on them. We exist by virtue of our material exchange, and we ourselves are also material in the grand scheme of the earth.

Even though materials are so much a part of our reality and everyday life, we rarely take the time to notice them, give them attention and maybe even care for them.

Over the past 2-3 generations, a basic knowledge of materials and their creation has been lost. This is a natural effect of both the specialization and streamlining of industry, and also, in particular, of the enormous development that has taken place in synthetic materials in particular. The vast majority of things, such as furniture, cookware, clothing, etc. today consist of so many components that it is impossible for the uninitiated to distinguish and recognize them. Many materials even try to pass themselves off as something they are not, and more and more often they succeed in deceiving us. It’s no wonder that many of us have lost track, lost our grasp and perhaps even some of our interest in the materials and their history.

But this lack of basic material understanding has consequences. Wrong purchases, incorrect use or treatment, and continued deterioration in quality, to name but a few. We have become alienated in our relationship to the origin of objects and indifferent through the overexposure of objects we are exposed to in our daily lives. In this article, I will explore whether a sensory awareness of our objects and materials – and the world around us in general – can lead us in a more sustainable, mindful and loving direction.

The smooth turn of the new century

In addition to the increased complexity of materials, there has been a trend throughout the 00s and into the 10s to reduce or completely remove the tactile nature of materials. Surfaces, textures and details on furniture and interiors in our homes have been replaced with new, smooth and shiny surfaces. The sawdust wallpaper from my childhood bedroom is now almost impossible to track down.

Juhani Pallasmaa describes the same trend in architecture in his book Architecture and the Senses (2014), where materials such as glass, mirrors and steel suddenly became dominant. One of the main points she makes is about these smooth and reflective surfaces that do not give the eye a detail to dwell on or a form and tactile structure to interact with.

‘Every breathtaking architectural experience involves many senses; spatiality, texture and scale are measured by the eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue, bones and muscles. Architecture confirms our presence, the human experience of being in the world, which is fundamentally an experience of the self.’ (Pallasmaa, 2014, p. 67).

For architecture to move us, it must activate our senses. But these smooth, even and reflective surfaces do not allow us to experience the materials, but instead throw our attention in all sorts of other directions. As with architecture, the materiality of our immediate surroundings and all our things can also confirm our being in the world – but it requires a sensory experience of them.

The sensory experience

We use our senses all the time, but most of the time we are not consciously aware of it. It’s only when they are unusually stimulated, such as a sudden bang or the smell of gasoline, or when we consciously seek stimulation, such as taste experiences in restaurants or decidedly aesthetic experiences like in the theater, that we really notice them.

Even if we don’t notice them, they are also central to how we interact with our things. Most of us probably have a piece of clothing in the back of our closet that we never choose for some undefined reason, or a favorite cup that just makes our coffee taste better. Some things may have an affective meaning and are linked to specific memories, while others have come into our possession by chance. Either way, our senses are activated when we use them – in fact, we can’t avoid it. This activation, if we become a little more aware of it, holds the possibility of creating new memories and sensory experiences.

Kristine Harper describes the significance of these memories as follows: ‘The physical memory is wordless, but nonetheless it provides access to a time travel that occurs in a split second and is caused by a similar physical experience. Such an experience can trigger a host of insightful or contextualizing thoughts and feelings.’ (Harper, 2015, p. 47).

These insights, understandings and feelings about connections and meaning, I believe, can be defining for the further relation to things.

Materiality as a philosophical parenthesis

In addition to the fact that our use of materials has hindered our interaction and sensory experiences with them, the philosophical and theoretical foundations of how it is possible to understand our being in the world have long failed to address materiality. Only with theorists like Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett has materiality finally regained a greater place in philosophy. With their theoretical frameworks of neo-materialism, speculative feminism and posthumanism, among others, they have built on the poststructural tradition that had the power of language and discourses as its main focus. This has been brought into the new movements, but to them has been added an attention to the material that is not only present but also has agency. Donna Haraway summarizes this quite succinctly in what has become her most famous quote:

‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ (2016, p. 12).

These currents take materiality seriously, as a significant part of our reality, and as something we must relate to on a par with all other aspects of our world.

The shift in sensory balance and our consumption habits

There has been a shift in the balance of how we use our senses, with the sense of sight taking over. This applies to everything from work and entertainment, to interior design and social media. We use visuals as our primary sensory stimuli and as the main way we express ourselves. Our consumption habits have also shifted to images on screens when buying clothes and food online.

One problem with this sensory, one-dimensional approach to our consumption is that once we can interact with it, hold it in our hands, smell it and turn it inside out, the products often appear slightly different than they did in the image. Even in stores, it has become more difficult to get a sensory overview of objects. Many items are carefully wrapped and illustrated with a representative image on the outside of the box.

According to Friedrich Schiller, all humans have the ability to have aesthetic experiences through their senses, and this ability can be trained and developed through aesthetic education (1996). It’s kind of the same mission I’m on. A kind of rediscovery of our senses, their importance and their potential. Would we make better purchasing decisions if we allowed ourselves to interact more with objects beforehand? If we smelled them, felt their weight, shape and surface – actually took the time to feel and evaluate them – and create a relationship with them?

Fortunately, there are already small movements in this direction. In particular, handmade ceramics, which ooze time, craftsmanship and are created in an easily decodable material, have found their way into many homes in recent years. Kitchen gardens and hand knitting are also more popular than ever before, and both can be read as a sign of a general hunger for the tactile, the handmade and the knowledge of materials and processes – for a knowledge of creation and origin. I’m sure that after months of waiting, you think you can taste the homeliness of the homegrown carrot, and that, if the knit succeeds, you become a little more careful about washing and handling your home knit than with the rest of your wardrobe.

It is precisely this attention and care for these selected materials and objects that I want to advocate for the spread of. If we took the time to experience the objects that surround us at home, on the street, in the office and in the woods, to notice their being, to consider their creation, their condition, where they belong and what they need, I believe we would choose objects with greater care in the first place, but also build more lasting and durable relationships with those we already have around us.

The interconnectedness and the importance of taking care of ourselves and our surroundings, precisely through increased awareness, is sharply described by Jane Bennett:

‘Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in this knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself.’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 13)

My thesis is that by giving materials, objects or objects sensory attention, we can create a relationship with them that can be edifying and perhaps hold the potential for an aesthetic experience. This applies to all kinds of objects – even those that do not immediately radiate beauty. By getting to know our surroundings, we connect with them and are more likely to take better care of them.

A sensory revolution

The word revolution has some powerful and loud connotations attached to it, but revolutions can also happen in close quarters. To be part of this sensory revolution, all you have to do is let your senses lead you.

Next time you wash the dishes, notice the brush you’re using. What materials is it made of? How did these come to be? How does it react to getting wet? What sounds does it make when it’s in contact with the other objects in the sink? Is it different depending on which object you’re washing?

It doesn’t have to be more complex than that. But small experiences like these can provide food for thought, insights and connections. Maybe questions about the creation of the brush go all the way down to the earth, to the worms that create the mulch that contains the nutrients needed for the fiber that sits like hair in the brush to grow?

Perhaps even deeper into the subsoil and prehistory that over time has turned into oil, which man has managed to pump up and created a technique to transform it from liquid to solid, in particular to plastic, which in turn can become the hairs in the brush?

So what is all this thought and attention for? The same question pops up in the introduction of Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter:

‘Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.’ (Bennett, 2010, p. ix).

If we open up the seemingly dead matter through curious and sensory awareness, we may be able to see the significance of the material, its history and current situation, through which the potential to build a relationship that will bring awareness and care in the future arises. A caring relationship that will benefit both ourselves and our materials and lead us in a more sustainable and loving direction.

Sources

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Harper, K. (2015). Æstetisk bæredygtighed (1. udgave). Samfundslitteratur.

Karana, E., Pedgley, O., & Rognoli, V. (2015). On Materials Experience. Design Issues, Volume 31(3), 16–27.

Pallasmaa, J. (2014). Arkitekturen og sanserne. Arkitektens Forlag.

Schiller, F., Øhrgaard, P., & Schiller, F. (1996). Menneskets æstetiske opdragelse (2. udg). Gyldendal.

St Clair, K. (2019). The golden thread: How fabric changed history (Paperback edition). John Murray (Publishers).

Theme: Green Production

Does it even make sense to create new products in a world where mountains of waste shape landscapes and the planet’s resources are exhausted by February? Humanity faces massive challenges to preserve the planet as more and more people have the opportunity to join the consumption party. Formkraft explores how crafts artists and designers are contributing to the green transition.

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