Material Beliefs was concieved as a project that encourages engineers and designers to engage in collaborative activity. Through a set of interests that at least partially overlap, the aim of these collaborations is to generate a body of work that will be set amongst different audiences.

To give these collaborations a good chance of succeding, they need to have a home. For Material Beliefs, the home is the lab. The lab is a site where research is concieved and carried out, where groups of researchers are formed, where sets of tools and resources are assembled. It is within this enviroment of people, processes and objects, that the initial shared interests of engineers and designers can develop as a result of observation and conversation.

After interviewing engineers about there work, research groups were approached to see if they would be interested in setting up a collaboration with a designer. A document (pdf format) was used to start this conversation, by setting some initial expectations and aims.

There are currently two main sites where collaborations are taking place:

• The Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imerial College London.
• Cybernetics at the University of Reading.

The aim is to set up four collorative teams, with one designer facilitating the collabortion for Material Beliefs at each site.