Smart storytelling stone: New meanings for traditional materials through interactive technologies

The evolution of the Industrial Design profession was heavily influenced by the possibilities of standardizable materials and manufacturing processes, which largely substituted natural materials in the everyday environment. With recent manufacturing advances, precious natural materials such as marble can be worked efficiently into a wider variety of shapes, raising the possibility of using them as a shell for functional components and electronics. The article describes such an exploration, focusing on stone as a case study, but what is interesting in general is how traditional materials can be re-interpreted and valorized through the advanced technologies of production, as well as technologies of interactivity and the Internet of Things. Combining traditional materials with a digital soul allows a different kind of dialogue between material and user, surpassing the admiration of morphological or material beauty, thus shifting toward a cognitive sensoriality.