The history of man is recorded, recovered and remembered through the designs he created and the materials he used. Materials are the stuff of design, and today is not the age of just one material, but of an immense range.Best selling author M. F. Ashby guides the reader through the process of selecting materials on the basis of their design suitability. He and co-author Kara Johnson begin with the assumption that products in a given market sector have little to distinguish between them in either performance or cost. When many technically near-equivalent products compete, market share is won or lost by the industrial design of a product: its visual and tactile attributes, the associations it carries, the image it creates in the consumer