2 quick questions:
besides the obvious models and textures required, what problems do you think could arise from making a new material tier? one that adds to dragonbone, daedric etc?

-how can one make a dragon be more intelligent and use all the shouts at its disposal, rather than just fire breath?

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12053

I advise opening this mod in the CK to see how he did it. It adds all the dragons' unused voices as well so that may turn you off, but it should give you a good idea of how it was accomplished.

As far as a new material goes you might have trouble making sure it is not redundant at all. The gaps between different materials aren't that large so finding just the right tier to put it in would take some work. You might also run into a lot of compatibility issues with other mods if you make any alterations to the smithing tree. I suppose finding more canonical materials might also be an issue (if you, unlike me, care about sticking to the cannon to a great extent) as I don't think they left many established materials out of skyrim (I can only think of mythril).

I guess you could get around incompatibility a few ways though, things like making it a quest/script added perk, making it only possible to create at a specific forge or making it use an existing perk would probably work. I suppose you could also make it require a skill above 100 if you made it require the http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1175. As far as balancing it I guess you could make it unique in some way, think of how silver weapons do more damage to the undead. You could say your new material is toxic and have it cause some damage over time or just do more damage to some creature types (like only humanoid races). You might also consider putting the armor values and weapon values at different tiers, in the real world some substances work much better as armor (think of how often plastics and ceramics are used in modern body armor of different types) while others make much better blades of different types (cyramic can make an extremely sharp blade that wont dull easily but it is to brittle for a sword while modern steel alloys can put even the best ancient steels to shame). As far as new materials go you can always say they are alloys or just more pure forms of established TES materials (look at http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ngerv/if_i_wanted_a_sword_made_from_materials_that/ and http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ge6qm/using_modern_materials_and_metallurgy_what_would/, they have lots of info about metallurgy).

I actually wanted to re-introduce 2 materials from previous ES games, which I miss.