Novel materials tend to prevent all forms of change in time and acquisition of signs of aging, which may affect their ‘perfect’ aesthetic qualities. It would not be wrong to claim that technological developments, the predominance of automation processes and quality controls have led - and been driven by - a trend favoring the dominance of an aesthetic model tied to perfection in every sphere of human life: the body, the style of life, products, and their materials. Such an aesthetic model tied to perfection can only be obtained with brand-new products and it inevitably encourages the possession of a ‘new’ one even if the ‘old’ one is still fully functional. As stated earlier by the pioneers in the design for sustainability domains, following such an aesthetic model stimulating the possession of the ‘new’ is a great threat to sustainable development. Founded in these discussions, in this chapter we address the implementation of a new approach to material aesthetics, based on imperfection and graceful aging. We discuss how both of these concepts can be used as a medium to express naturalness and uniqueness, and how they can create added values that can evoke longer-term attachment to products.

Toward a New Materials Aesthetic Based on Imperfection and Graceful Aging

Fiberness, reflectiveness and roughness in the characterization of natural and high quality materials

Many representations and rendering techniques have been proposed for presenting material appearance in computer graphics. One outstanding problem is evaluating their accuracy. In this paper, we propose assessing accuracy by comparing human judgements of material attributes made when viewing a computer graphics rendering to those made when viewing a physical sample of the same material. We demonstrate this approach using 16 diverse physical material samples distributed to researchers at the MAM 2014 workshop. We performed two psychophysical experiments. In the first experiment, we examined how consistently subjects rate a set of twelve visual, tactile and subjective attributes of individual physical material specimens. In the second experiment, we asked subjects to assess the same attributes for identical materials rendered as BTFs under point-light and environment illuminations. By analyzing obtained data, we identified which material attributes and material types are judged consistently and to what extent the computer graphics representation conveyed the experience of viewing physical material appearance.

Evaluating physical and rendered material appearance

This project aims to understand how basic sensory information generated by the interaction between human sensory transducers and the physical material or artefact under examination is processed within the relevant neural networks and how this contributes to the cognitive processes associated with the perception of naturalness.

Measurement of Naturalness (MONAT)

This paper presents the outcomes of an EU project (‘Measurement of Naturalness’, or MONAT), which aimed to develop a measurement system to predict the perception of naturalness for a range of materials, based on an understanding of the relationship between the physical attributes of the material and the human perceptual responses. The project included the establishment of novel measurement instrumentation to characterise the perceptually-relevant properties of the materials. New data analysis and modelling techniques were also developed to isolate the key physical properties of a material that influence the perception of naturalness, and to build mathematical models to describe the perceived naturalness in terms of these properties. The predictive power of the models proved to be extremely good, with correlation values in excess of 0.8 for new samples with properties similar to those used to develop the models, and reduction of error values above 70% for samples with properties falling outside this gamut.

Teresa Goodman

Papers

Measurement of Naturalness: Physics and Perception