Toward the future: innovations in materials design

With the advent of personal computing and the Internet, the opportunities for realizing new ideas and innovations are virtually limitless. In the context of materials development, an area which is pervasive and impacts nearly all aspects of our lives, these opportunities are potentially very profound. Materials design, as a profession and a field of research, has had an enduring legacy of contributions. Innovation is often associated with a 'leap' in performance or breakthrough from one: equilibrium point to another new point with new values. Innovations require 'something' new as well as incremental efforts based upon a feasible and rational plan. It is a dynamic process, driven by a 'sixth' sense and a human desire to discover. This human aspiration to innovate will be driven by and will leverage an 'exploding' information technology age which will foster evermore creative environments for design. Users of these environments will use tools which evolve and adapt to the user community. The speed and ease of use of such environments will accelerate the fusion and synergy of varying opinions and ideas, while minimizing expensive trial and error. New insights, however unorthodox, may be explored more rapidly, and at minimal expense, via virtual design environments which enable the simulation and modeling of artifacts regardless of their complexity. In this context, we have organized this session to stimulate your awareness of future directions for materials design, and more generally, we want you to reconsider the 'richness' of the computing resources, data, knowledge, methods, and communication technology available.