Market Drivers for Materials and Process Development in the 21st Century
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MATERIALS CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
Market Drivers for Materials and Process Development in the 21st Century F.R. Field III, J.P. Clark, and M.F. Ashby Economics has made us partners and necessity has made us allies. —John F. Kennedy
Sustainability Ergonomics
Aesthetics
Science
The true test of a brilliant theory is what first is thought to be wrong is later shown to be obvious. —Assar Lindbeck (of the Nobel Prize Committee commenting on Franco Modigliani’s award winning theory of Corporate finance)
Industrial Design Environment Technology
Design
Technical Performance
Firm Strategy
Science Push and Market Pull Materials are the “stuff” of engineering design. New materials inspire designers, but even more, design drives materials development. It is true that the most inspiring developments in engineering materials have emerged from scientific research into the structure of matter and its interaction with mechanical, electric, magnetic, and nuclear force fields, with radiation of all sorts, and with chemically different species. But for every dollar spent on inspirational research of this kind, a hundred dollars are spent on research of another kind: that driven by specific market needs. During the second half of the last century, the most potent drivers of this kind included the space race, nuclear power, the cold war, and the silicon-based computation revolution, to all of which the materials community responded appropriately. It is these that gave the field of materials much of its present momentum. But the drivers have now changed: The cold war has been superseded by competition of other sorts, and spending on both nuclear power and space has been scaled back. What has replaced them?
The Inputs to Product Design Figure 1 suggests the strongest drivers to which today’s designers seek to respond. While this figure is a gross simplification, it is a useful one upon which to structure this discussion. The four main factors upon which the designer relies when considering material choice are the relationship between material specification and (1) the Technical Performance of the product, (2) the Economic Performance of the product, (3) the Environmental Performance of the product, and 716
Geometry
Business Case
Product Cost
Material Properties
Fabrication Technology
Market Share
Figure 1. The driving forces that influence product design.
(4) the practice of Industrial Design embedded in the product and its functionality. Before turning to the consideration of these factors, it is worthwhile to explore briefly the way in which these performance metrics are ultimately employed by the designer. The existence of four main classes of information that drive materials specification (not to mention the myriad individual expressions of these objectives) suggests that the selection of a materials specification will require a careful balancing of the performance of the available alternatives. This sort of multiple objective decision-making is typical of most complex engineering decisions, but it is partic
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