pronunciation: /məˈtɪəriəl ˈselvɪdʒɪz/ noun (used with a singular verb)
1. A radio-making project examining materiality through Global Majority First Nations perspectives, with a focus on Southern and West Africa.
Etymology: From material + selvedges (plural of selvedge, also spelled selvage), from Middle English self + edge. The term performs deliberate wordplay with salvage (from Old French salvage, meaning "to save"), invoking both the textile concept of a self-finished fabric edge and the act of recovering suppressed knowledge systems.
What if materials are not just objects, but entities with their own life cycles, agency, and histories?
This series challenges the limits placed on how material is defined and understood. In most Western scientific, industrial, and design traditions, materials are framed as physical substances; understood primarily through measurable properties like density, conductivity, malleability, and strength. These traditions favour what can be handled, shaped, extracted, or engineered. They emphasise tangibility and manipulability, reinforcing a worldview in which material is something fixed, solid, and stable.
This framework is not neutral. It is the product of a historical arc shaped by colonial-industrial systems, from Enlightenment science to the Bauhaus and the pedagogies that followed. These models continue to inform design education globally, and by extension, the way many of us (trained within these systems) are taught to approach creation itself.
At the core of this project is a refusal of the false dichotomy inherited from Cartesian dualism: material versus immaterial, tangible versus intangible, matter versus spirit. These are not universal categories, but context-specific distinctions that have been elevated as default. By continuing to reproduce these splits, we restrict what can be recognised as form, as force, as matter.
This series does not reject the words “material” or “tangible.” Instead, it repositions them. It treats them as evolving, contingent terms—not fixed endpoints. What is considered graspable or ephemeral is never objective fact, but always defined by the dominant sensory hierarchies of a given system. In many Western traditions, that system has historically flattened sensory experience; privileging sight and touch while silencing smell, sound, vibration, memory, and atmosphere.
As articulated in with another’s design principle of Multi-sensory Materialism, this project works against such flattening. It asserts that the material is not limited to what can be handled, but includes what is felt, sensed, remembered, or absorbed across the full range of perception. We begin from the understanding that all things; regardless of their stability or scale; can act, affect, transmit, and hold consequence. Even what cannot be measured still holds weight. Even what disappears still leaves a trace. It is not in spite of instability, but through it, that materiality becomes most alive.
To give shape to these ideas, we turn to practitioners whose work engages directly with these expanded understandings. Through interviews and collaborations, we explore the topics outlined in the menu.
Background on with another’s third design principle is as follows:
Multi-Sensory Materialism
Advisory Unit: Integrating sensory intelligence into design. Studio Unit: Merging material presence with sensory perception.
In a world that often privileges the visual and solely thought-based reality, we advocate for a broader understanding of the senses and materiality. Multi-Sensory Materialism recognises that the materials from which we shape our world, extend beyond the physical to include elements we cannot see or touch—such as air, ideas, and emotions. Our approach embraces the richness of this full spectrum of sensory experience that is uniquely human.
Design should not flatten our sensory realities. Instead, it should enhance them. By embracing multidimensional experiences, we create inclusive imaginaries that resonate with diverse sensory modalities, cultures, needs, and ways of being. In doing so, we reject the tendency toward sensory reductionism and instead promote designs that engage all aspects of ourselves, understanding that (lived and embodied) experience far eclipses conceptual understanding.