materials library / classes / wood and plant structure
NEURODESIGN® · MATERIAL CLASS · WOOD AND PLANT STRUCTURE
Cork
Suberised bark cell structure. Closed-cell, high compliance, low thermal effusivity and meaningful impact sound reduction, all from the same cellular geometry.
Decisive attributes
The attributes that most determine how this class behaves and how it is experienced. No values are shown, because a value belongs to a product and not to a class. Two products of the same material can differ from each other by more than the material differs from its neighbours.
Typical application
Flooring. Wall panels. Underlay.
Worth watching
Cork is routinely described as warm, quiet and soft, and the cell structure makes all three plausible. No record in the corpus tests human response to cork specifically.
Evidence
No record in the research corpus tests human response to this material class. Its physical behaviour may be well understood and its properties may be entirely predictable from the attributes above. That is a different thing from evidence that a person responds to it, and this library does not convert one into the other. The absence is shown rather than filled.
Outcomes it could bear on
Outcomes whose material levers overlap this class. This is a structural relationship in the ontology, not a finding: it says the property is relevant to the outcome, not that this material produces it.
- Impact noise tolerancevia Impact sound reduction, Compliance under load, Bulk density
- Sleep onset and continuityvia Impact sound reduction, Thermal effusivity
- Autonomic downregulationvia Thermal effusivity
- Perceived warmth of a spacevia Thermal effusivity
- Tactile comfortvia Compliance under load
- Thermal comfort at contactvia Thermal effusivity