Habitarematerials
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
Looking for beautiful and sustainable materials your home or to your next project? What if you would have an access to the designer material libraries? Every year at the Habitare fair in Helsinki visitors have the opportunity to explore surface materials and experiment with material combinations. NEMO architects have curated a selection of sustainable interior and construction material samples with latest material innovations to a participatory exhibition experience called Habitarematerials.
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
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Description of the project
Summary
Habitarematerials is a new kind of interactive material library at Habitare, Finland’s largest furniture, design and decoration event, where visitors can explore surface materials and experiment with combinations of different materials for their projects and purchases. The goal is to provide a participative exhibition experience for the visitors, increase material awareness and enable a new way of exhibiting for material manufacturers.
In Habitarematerials visitors are welcomed to explore a curated selection of interior- and building materials. In the middle of the exhibition, stands a well lit material collage table, surrounded by the material library: vessels and shelves full of beautifully presented material samples form manufacturers, universities and individual designers.
From the material samples the visitors are encouraged to make material collages or material mood boards, combining the samples to a beautiful combination. This materials collage is then photographed as a flatlay photo on the collage table, to recall the combinations and to share the images through social media channels. By reversing samples the visitors can review key material facts, directly from the samples.
The exhibition is financed by the participating companies providing the material samples. By participating the exhibition, companies get their materials to the selection, but the full curatorial responsivility is with NEMO architects: Jussi Laine and Maria Klemetti Laine. The curators have also a right to order complimentary materials to the selection. This is how Habitarematerials becomes also a platform for latest material developement, research innovations and desiner materials.
Key objectives for sustainability
In this era of online shopping and high amount of visual merchandising, we feel that the customer have a right to truly make informed decisions by seeing, touching and smelling materials for their projects. We need to value and cherish our physical environment. It means we have to be both educated and to be in love with the choices we make in building it. When we make informed decisions with high personal attachment, we in Habitarematerials believe that the choices are better grounded and more sustainable. Deeply valued built environment is better taken care of and we pass the value also to the fellow people.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The fair environment is very stressfull and chaotic for the visitors. Every booth is trying to sell something and most of the information is purely marketing. Habitarematerials is not directly selling anything, but giving a space to explore and choose freely with all senses.
Habitarematerials aims for a calm atmosphere that allows spontaneous exploration and play. People are free to go through the material library. People collect materials by their liking and use their creativity in combining the materials on the collage table.
Most of the visitors described the exprience recreational and relaxing. It allowed fairgoers to process all the information they have had during the fair and the exhibitions. We believe that creating space for meaningful encounters is the best way to make real impact on peoples views and behaviour.
Key objectives for inclusion
Most of the domestic architecture and interior projects are done without designer involvement. As designers we often do complain about that. Habitarematerials is an iniative to tackle the challenge other way around by giving acces to designer tools to non-professional constructors and home renovators. If the power is with the end users, they should be equally informed and to be offered the same selection of materials and equal acces to the materials libraries than us designers.
Building and renovation retailers are often very limited in the range of supplies. The selection is controlled by long supply chains with tight contracts. For most of the non-design professional visitors Habitrarematerials library was also an eye opener. The amount of possibilities and also nature based, plastic fee and sustainable alternatives were a surprise. This also led to conversations of challenging the industry and surprisingly also to the topic of using a designer in the project.
Results in relation to category
We really opened may eyes and got the visitors to challene the industry by not accepting the limited selection they are allowed access to but to seek for more sustainable choises.
How Citizens benefit
We learn on that with the peoples beahvior. In the future Habitarematerials will have a small stage for societies, universities and manufacturers giving lecturettes on different materials. We want to widen the participatory porcesses through the prize.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
Material libraries do excist, but the are strictly professional only libraries with an admission or usage fee. We firmly believe that wider audience has the right to know what are the real options what comes to the surface and building materials.
Habitarematerials also is not a retailer. That enables us to invite interesting new, yet not profitable materials to even wider the sphere. This is how we get to be informative an even educational.
Learning transferred to other parties
What materials get picked? What are we drawn to? What are the reasons? Which senses do we trust the most in the evaluation process of a material?
We have been very interested on the reasons how visitors make material choises in their collages and for their projects. There is a massive potential of data collection in the project that we inted to utilize in the future. We have started discussions with Aalto University on research collaboration.
