TABLE OF CONTENTS 
A successful product one that performs well, is good value for money and gives pleasure to the user uses the best materials for the job, and fully exploits their potential and characteristics.
The families of materials metals, polymers, ceramics and so forth are introduced in Section 2.2. What do we need to know about them if we are to design products using them? That is the subject of Section 2.3, in which distinctions are drawn between various types of materials information. But it is not, in the end, a material that we seek; it is a certain profile of properties the one that best meets the needs of the design. Each family has its own characteristic profile the 'family likeness' useful to know when deciding which family to use for a given design. Section 2.2 explains how this provides the starting point for a classification scheme for materials, allowing information about them to be organized and manipulated.
Choosing a material is only half the story. The other half is the choice of a process route to shape, join and finish it. Section 2.3 introduces process families and their attributes. Choice of material and process are tightly coupled: a given material can be processed in some ways but not others, and a given process can be applied to some materials but not to others. On top of that, the act of processing can change, even create, the properties of the material. Process families, too, exhibit family likenesses commonality in the materials that members...
