An unfaceted gem — a polished dome over a flat or low-belly base. Used for opaque, translucent, and chatoyant stones (turquoise, opal, jade, cat's-eye chrysoberyl, star sapphires) where facets would be wasted. Reads soft, traditional, hand-shaped. The signet-ring stone, the Victorian mourning brooch.
Lapidary cabbing on a wheel — coarse grind to rough shape, fine grind to dome, pre-polish to remove scratches, polish on felt or hardwood lap with cerium-oxide or diamond paste. Dome height-to-base ratio typically 1:3 to 1:2. Optical phenomena cabochons unlock: chatoyancy (cat's-eye, in chrysoberyl), asterism (4-ray or 6-ray star, in corundum), play of color (in opal), aventurescence (in goldstone / sunstone). Faceting these stones would scatter the phenomenon out of view; cabochons concentrate it on the dome.
character — soft polished dome, hand-feel, color or phenomenon reads strongly.
GIA Diamond Grading and Identification literature; AGS American Gem Society cut-grading standards.
House vocabulary — terms ForMatter uses with intent.
Materials and processes for people who design and make things.
A local-first library of materials, processes, applications, and finishes — equal weight, citable everywhere, with cost-over-volume curves, trade-off profiles, equipment-tier filters, and second-life paths layered onto the data so a student can move from "what is this" toward "what's actually buildable here, now, by me." Part of the renato.design ecosystem — sibling of Plenum, Specimen, Ingenue, gesture, graf, and the Renato Rhino plug-ins. Form and matter, inseparable.
Half of teaching materials is teaching how the material is made into the thing. The standard subscription library was always light on that half. The wedge here isn't better samples or a prettier interface — it's treating Process as a peer entity, not a footnote.
Conway's Material World on raw materials, Lefteri's Making It on processes, Forty's Concrete and Culture, Sparke's Design in Context, Bürdek's Design: History, Theory and Practice of Product Design, Schröpfer's Material Design on materials in architecture, Winchester's The Perfectionists on tolerance, Minshall's Your Life Is Manufactured on the global supply chain, von Busch's Making Trouble on material activism, Were's How Materials Matter, Hegger / Drexler / Zeumer's Basics Materials, Untracht and McCreight on metalsmithing, USDA Forest Products Lab on woods, GIA on gemstones, Schott / CoorsTek / Toray / Owens Corning datasheets, MakeItFrom for verifiable property numbers, ASM Handbook, ISO standards. Museum holdings draw from the Met, MAD, V&A, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Newark Museum of Art, British Museum, Heard Museum, Smithsonian NMAI, Eiteljorg Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, and Grand Rapids Art Museum — collection-record permalinks only, designer overview pages and exhibition listings excluded. Voice blocks now ride on every entry kind — material, process, application, and finish — and include Ruskin on iron, Anni Albers on twining, Greg Lynn on the shred-and-teeth NURBS lineage, Pugin on the metal that won't be hammered, Barthes / Yanagi / Benjamin channeled within their philosophy; Sparke, Bürdek, Forty, Conway, Schröpfer, Minshall, von Busch, Lefteri, Pat Pruitt, Mary Lee Hu, Tom Joyce, Albert Paley, and the rest of the contemporary makers quoted verbatim with citation. All cited.
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