Granular materials are an integral part of our everyday life. They are also the base material for most industrial processing techniques. The highly dissipative nature of the particle collisions means energy input is needed in order to mobilize the grains. This interplay of dissipation and excitation leads to a wide variety of pattern formation processes, which are addressed in this book. The reader is introduced to this wide field by, first, a description of the material properties of granular materials under different experimental conditions that are important in connection with the pattern formation dynamics and, second, by further details given later on in the description of the specific system.