A new experimental technique involving instrumented indentation was demonstrated for the specific purpose of calibrating certain variations in elastic properties as a function of position in thermally sprayed and sintered materials. This work experimentally demonstrated for the first time that controlled gradients in elastic properties alone can lead to the suppression of damage and cracking during contact loading. New methods were developed in this work for the estimation of mechanical properties of ductile alloys and brittle ceramics by recourse to continuous measurements of load-penetration curves with spherical microindenters.