The major difficulty in the description of media behaviour relates to their inherent abilities to undergo structural changes which are manifested with separation and rearrangement of particles, processes of damage and fracture, phase transitions (or moving boundaries) and inhomogeneities of various kinds. The solution requires an essential change in formulating constitutive equations describing evolution processes occurring in the medium. It is not only difficult to predict the dynamic behaviour of the medium, but even to determine characteristic parameters of the medium and to obtain robustly repeatable experimental data. This remains an unsolved scientific problem, and it is thought that a significant progress can be made if the Colloquium gathers a good mixture of theoreticians, engineers, and experimentalists, who can approach this problem by different methods and techniques. It is hoped that the Colloquium will consequently initiate and stimulate relevant discussions between different scientific schools.