Furniture Design Ideas

E.1.1. Use Google to research the history and uses of one of the follow­ing materials: ■ Tin ■ Glass ■ Cement ■ Bakelite ■ Titanium ■ Carbon fiber 13   Exercises   Present the result as a short report of about 100-200 words (roughly half a page). Imagine that you are preparing it for schoolchildren. […]

Delmonte, J. (1985), "Origins of materials and processes", Technomic Publishing Co. ISBN 87762-420-8. (A compendium of information about materials in engineering, documenting its history.) Kent, R. www. tangram. co. uk. TL-Polymer_Plastics_Timeline. html/. (A Website devoted to the long and full history of plastics.) Malthus, T. R. (1798), "An essay on the principle of population", Printed […]

Homo sapiens—that means us—differ from all other species in its competence in making things out of materials. We are not alone in the ability to make: termites build towers, birds build nests, beavers build dams; all creatures, in some way, make things. The difference lies in the competence demonstrated by humans and in their extraordinary […]

All human activity has some impact on the environment in which we live. The environment has some capacity to cope with this impact so that a certain level of impact can be absorbed without lasting damage. But it is clear that current human activities exceed this threshold with increas­ing frequency, diminishing the quality of the […]

Now back to the main point: the environmental aspects of the way we use materials. Use is too weak a word; it sounds as though we have a choice: use, or perhaps not use? We don’t just "use" materials, we are totally dependent on them. Over time this dependence has progressively changed from a reliance […]

Materials have enabled the advance of mankind from its earliest begin­nings; indeed, the ages of mankind are named after the dominant mate­rial of the day: the Stone Age, the Age of Copper, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age (see Figure 1.1). The tools and weapons of prehistory, 300,000 or more years ago, were bone and […]

1.1 Introduction and synopsis This book is about materials: the environmental aspects of their produc­tion, their use, their disposal at end of life, and ways to choose and design with them to minimize adverse influence. Environmental harm caused by industrialization is not new. The manufacturing midlands of 18th-century Renewable and nonrenewable construction. Above: Indian village […]

The audit and selection tools developed in the text are implemented in the CES Edu 09 software, a powerful materials information system that is widely used for both teaching and design. The book is self-contained; access to the software is not a prerequisite. The software is a useful adjunct to the text, enhancing the learning […]

Michael F. Ashby The environment is a system. Human society, too, is a system. The sys­tems coexist and interact, weakly in some ways, strongly in others. When two already complex systems interact, the consequences are hard to pre­dict. One consequence has been the damaging impact of industrial society on the environment and the ecosystem in […]