matterswere

Matterswere refers to a speculative ontology and methodological stance that treats matter as an active participant in the making of events and meanings. The term blends matter with a sense of ongoing becoming, signaling that material substrates influence outcomes rather than merely support human action. Since its introduction in interdisciplinary debates in the early 2010s, matterswere has been used mainly in discussions of materiality, perception, and design.

The core claim is that material substrates—solids, fluids, artifacts, and digital media—do not simply support human activity; they shape it by providing affordances, constraints, and signs that participants respond to. In this view, agency is distributed across networks of humans and nonhumans, a perspective that echoes actor-network theory and process philosophy. Matterswere encourages analyzing situations by tracing material capabilities, transformative interactions, and emergent properties rather than drawing a rigid line between mind and matter.

In practice, scholars and practitioners invoke matterswere to examine fields such as architecture, interaction design, and conservation, focusing on how materials participate in environments and user experiences. Critics argue that the concept can feel vague and overly expansive, offering limited criteria for when a feature should be described as matterswere rather than simply materiality. Proponents counter that it provides a productive vocabulary for accounting for dynamism and relationality in complex systems.

Although not a formal scientific theory, matterswere functions as a heuristic in qualitative inquiry, helping to map networks of materiality, perception, and action and to frame how substances contribute to meaning in situated contexts.