The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture's Materials Lab and Interior Design Program have been awarded a $60,000 grant from the Angelo Donghia Foundation. The money will be used to reimagine how students learn about materials by reframing the Materials Lab’s existing collection to better highlight sustainable products. 

Beginning this fall, two graduate students and one undergraduate interior design student will work closely with Jen Wong, Lecturer and Director of the Materials Lab, to restructure the initiative’s circulating library and digital databases. They will be tasked with employing industry-standard sustainability criteria and certifications from resources, including the Mindful Materials database, the International Living Future Institute, and Building Green, to develop a new classification system for the collection. It will highlight materials relating to circularity, embodied carbon, health and toxicity, and social equity. 

“For the Interior Design Program, in particular, the Materials Lab is an invaluable resource that enables a hands-on, tactile engagement with materials and introduces students to the wide-ranging possibilities of products that form the built environment,” says Igor Siddiqui, Associate Professor and Director of the Interior Design Program. “Today, as the introduction of new technologies, climate change, and other social imperatives are rapidly redefining how we engage with materials, there is an urgent need for academia to keep up.”

“Material literacy is fundamental to the pedagogy and practice of built-environment design and planning,” adds Wong. “And yet, many students, educators, and practitioners lack the material knowledge essential to ecological and human health, from understanding the quantity of embodied carbon in our most common products to the chemical ingredients of concern in our most intimate interiors.”

The students will also research and source new acquisitions for the collection and curate a series of interior-specific exhibitions to showcase the new materials. 

UT Austin’s Materials Lab was established in 2001, serving as one of the largest academic material collections in the country, with over 29,000 material samples. 

“The students who use the collection today will enter their careers with a critical set of material concerns around sustainability that include circularity, embodied carbon, health and toxicity, and social equity,” notes Siddiqui. “Twenty years after the Materials Lab was established, there is an urgent need for us to rethink its content and structure so students now and into the future can become effective practitioners, and active stewards of our society and the planet.”