Materialtone

Materialtone is an urban STS method for studying how cities are held together chromatically and texturally. It starts from the hunch that infrastructures don’t only organize circulation, property, or risk; they also calibrate palettes, finishes, and wear. Each card isolates a color–texture fragment of infrastructure—a step, line, bollard, crack, stain, patch of tape, or faded sign—and treats it as a specimen of socio-technical life. These fragments register how standards, regulations, repairs, and improvisations sediment on the city’s surface, producing shared tones of safety, danger, care, and neglect.

As a method, Materialtone is less a fixed protocol than a chain of translations. Multimodal ethnography is “how it cooks”: walking, pausing, and paying attention; photographing small zones of color and texture; cropping images until only a tonal fragment remains; sampling pixels; naming tones; and designing cards. Each step slightly misaligns the previous one, turning sidewalks and barriers into chromatic data, and chromatic data into printed objects. In this process, technical norms (like safety yellow or municipal gray) encounter the mess of everyday use: dirt, rust, sun, tape, graffiti, and repair become legible as part of the city’s palette of maintenance.

Materialtone’s cards are not neutral swatches but speculative tools. They allow urban researchers, designers, and inhabitants to handle the city as a deck of tones that can be shuffled, compared, annotated, and put back into circulation. By re-collecting the chromatic and textural edges of infrastructures, the method invites new questions: How do colors govern movement and attention? Where do textures betray histories of labor, conflict, or care? And how might we design with, rather than against, the worn surfaces that already compose urban life?