In order to enable exploitation of noble metal/poly(vinyl-­‐alcohol) nanocomposites for device fabrication, solutions of poly(vinyl-­‐alcohol) suitable for piezo-­‐driven inkjet printing techniques are identified and discussed in terms of their material properties. The printable poly(vinyl-­‐alcohol) medium is then exploited as a host material through the formation of silver or gold nanoparticles in order to create nanocomposites that exhibit a surface plasmon resonance behaviour associated with the small metallic inclusions. To mitigate some of the material redistribution...