025 – Andrew Dent of Material ConneXion – Staying in Touch with Materials

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Innovative, advanced, and sustainable materials library…

Andrew Dent, Executive Vice President, Research for Material ConneXion (the world’s largest library of innovative, advanced, and sustainable materials – (profile)) – joins Stephanie Benedetto, Samanta Cortes, and Rob Sanchez at the MouthMedia Network Studios powered by Sennheiser.

Materials across industries, the magic of physical samples, and four tenents

Dent describes how Material ConneXion show clients who make anything them how to make better products ranging from beds, to clothing, flooring, appliances, vehicles, furniture, exploring new and interesting materials, providing both digital and in-person searches, but how there is no substitution for physical samples. The way it sparks innovation and inspiration, the ability to touch and feel materials across various markets. Four tenents for innovation to get into the library, artificial spider silk, and making fabrics out of milk.

Spider silk, composites, and sustainability

How Adidas came out with product with synthetic spider silk that was completely biodegradable in a few hours with a special enzyme, how North Face created a Moon Parka and Bolt Threads has a tie from spider silk, and what makes sustainable product work when needed and disappear when not. How products from natural resources can break down, and making sure a product at the end of life is timed for being at end of usefulness. Where Material ConneXion is going in the future, how the composites world is changing quietly and seeing more automation that allows use in more applications, seeing shifts and cycles, how many foods make good plastics, dealing with abundance of foods and oversupply into sustainability arguments, and making sure that doesn’t take away from natural resources.

Creating new products, printed and embedded electronics, and Milan

The way women apply cosmetics in South Korea is different, how every material has a solution, a case that had difficulty but had an exciting solution, new ways of designing and doing things by new ways of looking at materials, even transforming products into new things such as embedded robotics and digital circuitry, printed electronics, and challenges that they bring, and considerations of the after life of products and materials. And a round of Remnants personal questions covers great grounding in the physical world, loving and being taken up by Milan, the Milan Furniture Fair, new experiences, an unlimited palette, when artists and scientists get together, and hope.