"Material culture" food for thought:

"It is the form of the artifact, not its substance, that is attributed to culture. This is why, in the extensive archaeological and anthropological literature on material culture, so little attention is paid to actual materials and their properties. The emphasis is almost entirely on issues of meaning and form -- that is, on culture as opposed to materiality. Understood as a realm of discourse, meaning and value inhabiting the collective consciousness, culture is conceived to hover over the material world but not to permeate it. In this view, in short, culture and materials do not mix; rather, culture wraps itself around the universe of material things, shaping and transforming their outward surfaces without ever penetrating their interiority. Thus the particular surface of every artifact participates in the impenetrable surface of materiality itself as it is enveloped by the cultural imagination."

(Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling, and skill. London: Routledge. Quoted pages 340-341)

• This is exactly the kind of mentality I would like to challenge through my studies of the intersection of social properties (technological and cultural choice) and the intrinsic properties (chemical, physical, mechanical, etc.) of materials!
• Engineers involved in materials science studies emphasize the deep interconnection between structure (subatomic, atomic, microscopic, macroscopic), property (mechanical, electrical, thermal, magnetic, optical, deteriorative), and processing (performance) of materials.