considered separately in a reductionist way. It has been my conviction that a real design perspective entails seeing all these realms as essential (and complementary) arenas of transformation, even though each arena may entail very different change strategies. This was a theme of my previous book, but this thesis provides an opportunity to examine design-based strategy more deeply in a particular areathat of building materials. Hopefully it can be thought-provoking for many of those in the building industry who deal with materials. But I also feel it might be of interest to those more generally concerned with either social change or information age economic development strategy. I wanted to make some contribution to considering all the levels involved and the relationships between themrelationships which are all too often assumed or ignored in discussing sustainability strategies.