Hey Jenny, thanks for posting this. I think these badges are super relevant to OScH and would be an awesome thing to promote within our community. I made a post back in March hoping that someone from OSF would be attending GOSH2017 (@punkish said he has some contacts there).
It seems that the OSF is using the term “Materials” very broadly in the same way we have been trying to promote the term “Hardware” as covering not just electronics/tools/machines but any physical objects (including reagents and materials). It is unfortunately that we now have 2 different words attempting to represent the same meme and competing for mind share. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I think it would be great to start a conversation/dialog.
I can appreciate that from the perspective of a scientific paper, you have methods and materials (and that materials would include anything we would call hardware), so maybe the term materials makes the most sense in this context. Outside of scientific publishing, I think it would be great to have an open hardware badge for people to post on their websites/wikis/git repository/etc. I think it could become especially interesting if by including one of these badges on your site (with appropriate metadata), we could somehow generate an up-to-date registry of OScH projects from across the web.