Rosie Hornbuckle and Sanne Visser
Material development has traditionally been the domain of materials science and engineering. However, in recent times the material innovation space has taken the path of embracing complexity. First with the understanding that new materials need to be developed with target applications and users in mind, to ensure return on research investment and effective use of resources. Then, as sustainability and circularity discourses evolved, the material innovation landscape changed to incorporate the views of, for example, recycling technologists, environmental scientists and raw materials producers. More recently, in the ‘systemic turn’, material innovation has taken on quadruple- or in some cases quintuple- helix models to consider multi-level and multi-actor viewpoints on how and why materials are developed, used and disposed of, or regenerated. Meanwhile, considerations of scaling and proximity are overlapping and their meaning within the interdisciplinary landscape is varied. These notions also impact the material innovation space, where capitalist technological notions of ‘scaling-up’ confront the social and ecological ideologies of ‘scaling out’ and ‘scaling deep’. These also relate to ideas of proximity, where scale of production, level of participation, distribution of expertise, access and connection become increasingly important, but also nuanced, difficult to grasp, and tricky to disentangle. This paper aims to begin the disentangling of scaling and proximity in Systemic Material Innovation by considering these phenomena in two research projects. One is a consortium project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, where the collaboration was extensive and distributed, material production was relatively large-scale, yet engagement with local communities and proximity to impacts was also prioritised. The second project was place-based and deeply rooted in participatory research and knowledge exchange with the local community, coming to ‘scaling’ from the ground up. This paper examines different forms of scaling and proximity within each project and what they reveal about Systemic Material Innovation methods and models.
Keywords: Scaling-up; scaling-out; scaling-deep; proximity; Systemic Material Innovation; material innovation; social innovation