Helping promote the importance of healthy materials

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The Healthy Materials Lab is an innovative organization working at the intersection of design, material science, the built environment, and higher education. By focusing on the health impacts of toxic materials in the world around us, the Lab's mission is to create a future where the heath and well-being of all individuals is placed at the center of design decisions. Over the course of three years, Familiar has worked with the Lab to build a compelling website incorporating a network of resources and valuable research into a tool for a variety of audiences.

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Material Collections

Making smart material choices is one of the first steps in designing healthier environments. A key initiative of the lab involves staying up-to-date on the latest healthy products available in the building market and helping make solid recommendations to consumers, designers, and individuals who spec materials. Over the course of two years, we worked with the Lab on developing the Material Collections section of the site to help showcase their research. The result is a library of collections that users can digest at a glance, or click through for more in-depth information.

Each collection focuses on a group of products, sometimes gathered by application, sometimes by manufacturing method. Within a collection, each product features information on material composition, design specifications, as well as disclosures and safety information. We also built in the ability to download this information as a product sheet PDF that a user can save locally.

Subject Complexity

The work of the Lab covers a wide range of subject material, from chemical composition and material science to design thinking and project planning for built environments. Familiar’s work with the Lab encompassed a great deal of research and content strategy on how to frame explorations into the subject matter from both a high-level and a more casual, consumer-focused approach. The Tools and Guides section of the site showcases this thinking by gathering internal and external resources into five major topic areas.

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Glossary

The site acts as a resource for a wide range of audiences: students, architects, developers, consumers, and the general public. Not every user will understand the meaning of some of the technical terms used on the site (what exactly is an isocyanate?). To address this challenge, Familiar created a dynamic, ever-present glossary that allows a user to hover on a specific underlined term and quickly access a handy definition.