It does communicate a bit, even if it's confusingly worded and targeted to a specific audience.

Material Design has two parts: A physical structure based on how objects lie in the real world (particularly inspired by the physical appearance paper and ink), and animations that seem magical, playful, or imaginative.

This lays out the inspiration behind material design, and differentiates it from skeumorphism: which copies real world elements unimaginatively, and simple "flat" design, which is not necessarily tactile or imbued with a system of animations or motion.

They do to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a bit puffed up in the obtuse humanities style, but I do get its meaning.

I also hate empty speak, but I think the issue here is not that it doesn't communicate anything, but it does so with overly flowery language. What I'm reading is the "material" concept unifies 1) location in space and 2) motion, and it's based in objects in the real world (e.g. paper and ink) but is a framework that can be creatively extended and built upon.

It's standard design agency rhetoric to impress customers, applied for example when a company has spent a million dollars on a new logo and a font choice, and needs some reassurance that the entire world will view them in a completely different light as soon as the newly rounded/squared/deconstructed logo graces their letterhead.

Its occurrence here indicates that Google hires expensive design professionals with impressive ad industry résumés, I guess.

Material Design is mostly linked to Matias Duarte. I would ask you to take a look at his history instead of just asserting that it's just ad industry professionals.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat%C3%ADas_Duarte

I strongly disagree that this is design agency BS!

Please watch the video where they introduced material design (way back at some I/O) to see what all those words mean.

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBD0VlcVS1E

I hate MD and this video helped me to understand why I hate it: they are trying to do judge by analogy, which causes «analogy driven design», where you should understand analogy to understand what you see. I newer saw real objects to behave like their imaginary «real objects». It looks like they are just getting money for something that nobody knows how to do properly, so they are doing something and arguing correctness of their work with self-made arguments. IMHO, if they will be hired to do an animation film, they will be fired pretty quickly for their «material design», because it looks false.

Although the OP's quote is not nearly as extreme, it does remind me a little of this: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

It's a design brief that explains how the new Pepsi logo is the physical manifestation of the grand unified 'theory of everything'.... or something like that. I still can't figure out whether it's meant as a parody.