Materials design is a complex iterative process that requires a combination of theoretical and experimental work. Designing porous composite materials such as polymer matrix syntactic foams involves numerous material parameters related to particles and matrix resin. In addition, the intended service conditions impose requirements for characterization, which may include testing at different temperatures and strain rates. As the next frontier in their applications, syntactic foams are now designed for 4000+ m depth underwater applications and large scale ship structures, which requires several fundamental advancements in the area of materials design and characterization. The present work discusses the challenges specific to designing and fabricating syntactic foams as per the requirements of an application. The possibility of reducing the characterization effort by correlating the temperature and strain rate effects by an elastic-viscoelastic transform, sampling methods and machine learning methods is also discussed.