Aaron Betsky is a US-based writer, educator and critic, who has served as director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, as well as a curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has also written over 20 books with subjects ranging from Zaha Hadid, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Dutch architecture practice MVRDV to the relationship between architecture and same-sex desire. He is about to publish another. Don’t Build...

Nicole Rycroft is the founder and executive director of the award-winning environmental not-for-profit, Canopy. Since it launched in 1999, the Vancouver-based organisation has worked with more than 950 companies – including Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Puma – to ‘develop innovative solutions and make their supply chains more sustainable to help protect our world’s remaining ancient and endangered forests’. It started by looking at the book industry and persuading publishers to use more...

Mark Hearld is an artist and designer who has a fascination with flora and fauna and has worked in a range of different media – including lithographic and linocut prints, painting, ceramics, textiles and tapestry. However, he is best known for his collage pieces. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, he has curated installations and exhibitions at York Art Gallery and Compton Verney and is an avid collector of objects. Over the years, he has been a huge advoca...

Todd Bracher is a US-based product designer who has worked with brands such as Humanscale, 3M, Herman Miller, Georg Jensen and Issey Miyake through his eponymous studio, winning a slew of awards along the way. More recently, he created another company, Betterlab, in which he collaborates with scientists and innovators to, in his words, ‘shape emerging research and foundational technologies into game-changing products’. The company has taken a particular interest in the potential of light...

Zena Holloway is a bio-designer and founder of Rootfull, which creates exquisite clothes, lights and sculptures from grass roots. She started her career as an underwater photographer, doing extraordinary high-end fashion shoots, as well as working with the likes of Kylie Minogue, Tom Daley, Katie Price and numerous other celebrities. At the same time, she was capturing the effects of pollution on the UK’s river beds. So how and why did her career shift so dramatically?In this episod...

Alkesh Parmar is a designer and researcher. Over the years, he has hollowed out champagne corks and turned them into chandeliers, as well as transforming traditional Indian terracotta cups into light fittings. But he is best known for his work with citrus peel in general – and orange peel in particular.Using a material generally thought of as waste, he has created a variety of extraordinary products including a juicer (for obvious reasons) and a lampshade. His practice combines craft with cri...

Sanne Visser is a Dutch-born, London-based designer. She describes herself as a ‘material explorer, maker and researcher’, who is best known for a string of installations and products using human hair. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins a little under a decade ago, she has exhibited all over the world and been nominated for a number of awards. Happily too, she will be one of the stars of this year’s Material Matters fair – taking place at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf from 18-21 S...

Artist Bharti Kher was brought up in England before moving to India almost on a whim in the early ’90s. Since then, she has established herself as a major player on the international art scene. Her sculptures talk about women’s place in society and the female body. She has a fascination with mythology and mixing the real with the magical, as well as a profound interest in materials and found objects. She has melted down bangles, used saris, and ceramic figures, as well as casting people ...

Oliver Heath is a designer, architect, author and one of the world’s leading advocates for biophilic design. Along with his team and the sustainable platform Planted, he currently has an exhibition at the Roca Gallery in South London, which focuses firmly on bio design – illustrating what it is, why it’s important, and how it can be used in the spaces we inhabit. Oliver has been a fixture on our TV screens since 1998, working for the likes of the BBC, ITV, Channel Four, the Discovery Cha...

Ernest Scheyder is an author and senior correspondent for Reuters. His new book, The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives, looks at the impact of the green transition in the US – and, more particularly, the tensions over the increasing need to mine for metals to decarbonise the grid (and power a plethora of devices) against the nation’s desire to conserve the environment. The book illustrates how materials effect geo-politics and the urge for energy securi...

Adi Toch is one of the world’s most fascinating metal artists, who over the years has buried her pieces for months on end before digging them up, and even made them react to sound. She has also taken part in collaborations with furniture makers and glass artists. Adi has work in the permanent collections of the V&A, The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland, and the Jewish Museum in New York. She won a Wallpaper Magazine Design Award in 2017, and in that ...

Jonathan Smales is a housing developer like few others. He is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Nature, whose new project, The Phoenix, on the outskirts of Lewes, East Sussex in the UK, has just won planning permission. What makes the development different? The Phoenix will contain 685 homes, designed by a roster of fascinating architects, who will be working in materials such as cross laminated timber and Hempcrete. The development will be pretty much vehicle-free, wit...

Adam Yeats is co-founder and managing director of Bert Frank, one of the UK’s leading lighting companies. Yeats started the brand with designer, Robbie Llewellyn, in 2013. Since then it has gone from strength to strength, opening a showroom in London’s Clerkenwell in 2019, exhibiting at home and abroad, and winning the Elle Decoration British Design Award for Lighting in 2016. The company was also the headline sponsor for last year’s Material Matters fair. Craft has always been an intrin...

Ptolemy Mann is a British artist who came to widespread attention with her woven textile pieces, often stretched across a frame and notable for her extraordinary use of colour. More recently, her practice shifted and she has turned to painting on paper with fascinating – and inevitably colourful – results. Her latest pieces combine the two, as she paints on her hand-woven artworks. Ptolemy is hard to avoid at the moment. Currently, she has a show of paintings at the Union Club in Lo...

Bas van Abel founded Fairphone in 2013. The company attempts to transform the way our smartphones are manufactured, by reducing e-waste, sourcing conflict-free minerals, and improving working conditions in its supply chain. It creates a product consumers are encouraged to keep longer and which, importantly, they can also repair themselves.  Fairphone was an immediate hit, attracting 25,000 orders when it launched its first smartphone via a crowd-funding campaign. It has now sold over half a...

There have been over 100 episodes of Material Matters but, for listeners who might be new to all this, the idea is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist, or architect about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers.  However, once in a while I break my own self-imposed format and interview someone I’ve always wanted to meet. This is one of those episodes.  Architect John Tuomey is the co-founder of multi-award...

Sara Grady and Alice Robinson co-founded British Pasture Leather in 2020. The duo aim in their own words ‘to link leather with exemplary farming and, in doing so, to redefine leather as an agricultural product’. All of which means creating a new network of systems within the industry. Essentially, the pair are attempting to make the material we buy traceable in the same way food is.  In 2022, they created an exhibition, entitled Leather from British Pastures, during the London Design...

Florian Gadsby is a bit of a phenomenon. The ceramicist currently has a new show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and has also published a memoir, By My Hands, that charts his formative years with clay, including apprenticeships in the UK and, most intriguingly, Japan.  Essentially, it unpicks his route to becoming a fully, fledged professional potter, while at the same time, providing tips about his thinking and process.  Since he started on Instagram a decade ago, Florian has built up a...

Christien Meindertsma is a Dutch designer who has a fascination with materials. She currently has an installation at the V&A, entitled Re-forming Waste, which shows new work based around her interest in linoleum, as well as technological advances with the material she has described as her first love, wool. Christien came to wider attention initially when she graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2003, with a book that catalogued a week’s worth of objects confiscated at security...

This special festive episode is slightly different because, as we come to the end of 2023, we thought it would be interesting to talk to someone who has had a breakthrough year.  And we couldn’t think of anyone that description fits better than UK-based designer, Simone Brewster. In June, Simone held her first solo exhibition at the NOW Gallery on London’s Greenwich Peninsular, entitled The Shape of Things. While, in September, her installation Spirit of Place with cork company, Amorim,...

Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert is a Paris-based designer, maker, and artist, obsessed with blown glass. In an eclectic career, that has seen him travelling through the USA and Europe, before settling in France in 2007, he has shown work at the V&A, Vessel Gallery in London, and Palais de Tokyo among others. His pieces are also held in a number public collections including: Bibliotheque de France de L’Ecole National des Chartes, and Germany’s European Museum of Modern Glass. In 2016, Jeremy was...

Neil Thomas is the founder and director of Atelier One, one of the most creative engineering practices in the UK. The firm has worked on building projects such as Singapore Arts Centre, Federation Square in Australia, and Baltic in Gateshead, as well as with a hugely impressive roster of artists, including Anish Kapoor, Marc Quinn and Rachel Whiteread. It has also created stages for stadium rock shows from Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, U2, and Take That, often in collaboration with...

Caroline Till is a consultant, author, curator, and academic. She founded Franklin Till, along with Kate Franklin, in 2010 and, since then, the future research agency has worked with the likes of international textile exhibition Heimtextil, paper giant GF Smith, Caesarstone, Tarkett, and IKEA’s former blue sky thinking agency, Space 10.  The pair has published magazines such as Viewpoint and Viewpoint Colour and co-written the influential book Radical Matter, as well as curating Our Time on...

Tom Lloyd and Luke Pearson co-founded the hugely influential design studio, Pearson Lloyd, in 1997. Since then, it has gone on to work in areas such as the workplace, transport and health care, with organisations like Virgin, Lufthansa, the Department for Health, and furniture giant Senator.  The practice is the Designer of the Year at the Material Matters 2023 fair and will be using the space at Bargehouse to investigate how its use of materials has been transformed over recent years,...