Spot Material is a brand new addition to the designer’s toolbox. Setup to bring together material data with circular insights and inspiration, it fuels the creative process and enables the development of better products and services.

This design tool takes a holistic approach to material selection with a structured search framework, bridging the gap between sustainable design principles, big data, practical considerations and the creative process to establish novel solutions for circularity. We have collected insights from the factory floor, manufacturers, material suppliers, trade fairs, databases and material libraries. This unique material-search platform enables better choices to be made based on the best available data.

Get 12-months access to all the materials, data, insights and inspiration. Explore what our platform has to offer.

Companies need to find sustainable solutions. There are many materials and so much data that it is very hard to find the right technology, making the process of sustainable design challenging and expensive.

There is growing pressure on products, buildings and services to become circular with reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. During the design phase many ideas will be explored and rejected based on this requirement. Material selection is a critical part of the process, because it shapes the visual, tactile and technical attributes of an object, as well as defining an object’s overall sustainability. The design tool integrates the information needed to make these decisions into a single source, merging traditional database logic, sustainable design frameworks and the creative process.

Get 12-months access to all the materials, data, insights and inspiration. Explore what our platform has to offer.

One of the major challenges of sustainable design is getting good, comparable data for material options so you can see the benefits and trade-offs.

For the first time, designers are able to search for materials using a mix of technical specification, sustainable attributes and context. This new data infrastructure supports the design phase like never before. A unique, reliable and comparable dataset of design materials had to be built, curated to provide an unbiased foundation for reference. Individual materials are analysed by ingredient, so grades and variations may be compared based on composition and independent of terminology skews.

Get 12-months access to all the materials, data, insights and inspiration. Explore what our platform has to offer.