Many of us are enamored with smart materials. Whenever the term “smart” is used to describe a technology—such as shape-memory polymers or thermochromic coatings—it communicates elevated functionality, advancement, and intelligence. The German architect Axel Ritter has defined smart materials as “highly engineered materials that respond intelligently to their environment.” Or, more specifically, “materials, substances and products [that] have changeable properties and are able to reversibly change their shape or color in response to physical and/or chemical influences, e.g., light, temperature or the application of an electrical field.”
According to the authors Michelle Addington and Daniel Schodek, the first commercial use of “smart material” dates to 1992, when it was used to describe snow skis. But as the term has become more widely adopted, its meaning has become increasingly nebulous. Today, we have smart homes, smartphones, and smart cars—to name just a few examples of its widespread use.
As a result, how we define smart materiality continues to evolve, particularly given the expanding applications and advantages of these substances. In the new book Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution (Princeton University Press), Skylar Tibbits offers the latest vision for how such material approaches should be understood, and how the design field can benefit as a result.
As the founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, Tibbits has been tinkering with smart materials since he was a design and computation student at the same institution. In 2013, Tibbits popularized the term 4D printing—an enticing manufacturing approach using materials that transform physically over time. The technology employs environmentally responsive materials that adopt new, typically predetermined shapes: for instance, a flat chain made of hydrophilic polymer that forms the letters “MIT” when submerged in water.
4D is just one of many new technologies the Self-Assembly Lab is exploring, using both smart and dumb (or inert) materials to develop a broader set of approaches known as programmable matter. Initially coined in 1991 as a concept in applied computing, the term programmable matter involves intentionality—namely, designing substances that not only have manipulable but also predictable behaviors. Things Fall Together embraces this intentionality, providing a broad conceptual framework in which to understand the present and future uses of transformable materials.
The book is organized into nine chapters, seven of which focus on specific approaches and capacities. Each chapter presents a polemical argument that reframes common preconceptions about a topic. For example, 4D printing appears in the chapter “Robots without Robots,” which profiles technologies that dynamically respond to shifting environmental forces. For Tibbits, the responsive characteristics of programmable matter should give us a new perspective on the field of robotics. He describes conventional robots as devices designed to overcome environmental factors like gravity, vibration, or solar exposure. But he believes that approach has its shortcomings. “Rather than fight the surrounding forces, we can incorporate materials in such a way that we can take advantage of this energy to do useful work,” Tibbits writes. “Harnessing the very forces that have long been considered obstacles to overcome in the engineering process can radically improve a product and its performance.”
He offers the comparison between an airplane wing—which is designed to resist considerable wind pressures—and a bird’s wing, which takes advantage of the same forces more nimbly and effectively. Inspired by such real-life examples, 4D printing is part of a larger emerging field called soft robotics. “This new breed of soft-material robots tends to be cheaper and easier to produce; they don’t rely on batteries or electricity; they are disposable, recyclable, and extremely safe,” Tibbits writes. The soft robotics approach is “smart” in that it relies on innate responsiveness—yet it has many advantages over traditional smart materials. Tibbits argues that conventionally understood smart materials are too expensive, geometrically constrained, and limited in their functional abilities. By contrast, soft robotics enables the customization of the very architecture—and programmed response—of the material itself. Additionally, the ingredients used in soft robotics applications are typically less expensive and more accessible than traditional electromechanical systems. An example is Harvard University’s “Octobot,” a soft-printed robot composed of multiple materials and an internal microfluidic system that enables it to propel itself autonomously. With this strategy, Tibbits argues, “we can potentially see a future when many products are printed with all of the intelligence embedded directly into the material, not requiring additional assembly or components to make them ‘smart.’ "
Other chapters offer similarly fresh insights. “Computing is Physical” reveals how the digital world relies upon silicon, chips, transistors, and other materials, and provides glimpses of a future in which the materials themselves compute. “Order from Chaos” evaluates the common presumption that designed products all deteriorate over time, providing examples of programmable systems that counteract this process via self-assembly. “Less is Smart” subverts the assumption that smart technologies are intrinsically more complex, expensive, and power-hungry. “Build from the Bottom Up” explores emergent systems made of self-similar units—a reversal of a designer’s typical top-down approach in creative practice. “Reverse, Reuse, Recycle” confronts the environmental crises of global warming and resource over-utilization, arguing that new material processes can accommodate constant change with zero waste.
In short, Things Fall Together upends commonly held presumptions about how the constructed world operates. The book focuses on the topic of smart materiality rather than smart materials—and assesses their broad potential rather than their technical specifics. This expansive consideration, told from the perspective of a designer/scientist, offers a more accessible and substantive understanding of “smartness” in the physical environment. Readers looking for a more rigorous scientific and scholarly analysis, which might be expected of a book published by an academic press, will likely be disappointed. Conversely, readers who appreciate a broad conceptual exploration devoid of technical minutiae should be delighted.
We need just this kind of bold, cross-disciplinary thinking to unlock the full potential of designed materials—and to realize a future in which materiality is considered at every stage and scale of the design process. As Tibbits predicts, “Programmable materials may go beyond computing to become ubiquitously embedded in every molecule, crystal, strand, fiber, sheet, and block of material that we use to create the physical world."
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
