Design Discussion; Form Follows Material

How do material and form relate? How much of a role does material
carry in the form of the end product? It seems that in the conceptual
stage of design materials rarely have any influence and are instead
applied as an afterthought. This is especially easy to do in digital
modelling, for me at least. The notion of function based form has long
been accepted as a tried and true method, but I'd like to deviate from
this approach and ignore function initially. Instead I intend to account
for material properties at the onset of the design process. One
designer who has developed a body of work discussing the creation of
form and its materiality is Neri Oxman who, in the video below states,
"Ask not what
an object wants to be, but rather what a material wants to be." This
strikes me as a fascinating concept as it provides the opportunity for
the material to speak for itself.