Materials and Design: Function and Personality

Chapter One: Function and Personality

Reflection Paragraph:
After reading the first chapter, I kept thinking about carbon fiber as a material and how it emits a certain personality on its own, and transforms the characteristics of things made out of carbon fiber. It is an exotic material that is light weight, and reusable. It's also very strong, but many people aren't aware of these facts. The chapter briefly talks about the wants of a consumer, and how the design as well as the functionality of a product relies on this. However, it is the materials the product is made of which enables both designers and engineers to produce such a thing. I guess that's why I kept thinking of carbon fiber. It is one of those materials that enables designers and engineers to accomplish things that other materials simply couldn't do, or do inefficiently. Carbon fiber as a material can also be used as a an example to convey on of the main messages of the first chapter. That is, we must know the process by which something is created to understand the limits and possibilities of creation. The act of knowing starts from the materials. Once you know the materials, we can get an idea of how it can be manipulated to produce something. It's like a cyclical process. We may want to produce something, but we must know about the materials. We must also know about the process to get an idea of what materials to use. Someone must be an expert in carbon fiber to know what can be made out of it, but they must also be aware of the processes they may potentially use which can alter the end product.