Architect and computer scientist Skylar Tibbits heads up MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab , a sort of cross-disciplinary skunkworks that is completely re-thinking how objects are manufactured and assembled. By combining digital manufacturing techniques with the study of how particular materials react to particular types of energy, Tibbits’ team seeks to create things that, well, put themselves together—whether large or small—when the appropriate energy is introduced as a catalyst. Self-Assembly is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through local interaction. We have demonstrated that this phenomenon is scale-independent and can be utilized for self-constructing and manufacturing systems at nearly every scale. We have also identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of responsive building blocks, energy and interactions that can be designed within nearly every material and machining process available. Self-assembly promises to enable breakthroughs across every applications of biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration. The Self-Assembly Lab is working with academic, commercial, nonprofit, and government partners, collaborators, and sponsors to make our self-assembling future a reality. The concept sounds difficult to wrap your head around, until you see the video: Here’s a TED Talk Tibbits gave earlier this year going into more detail: (more…)
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Skylar Tibbits’ 4D Printing: Energy + Materials + Geometry = Self-Assembly
If you’re designing urban homes for Japan, you’ve automatically got two built-in problems: Earthquakes and tiny building footprints. Japan’s seismic woes are well-known, and the nation’s space-tight cities mean you’re always dealing with narrow frontage. The traditional way to combat the former is to use shear walls, which combine bracing and cladding in such a way as to prevent lateral motion. (Think of an unclad wall made from vertical studs, and how it can potentially parallelogram if the floor or ceiling moves; nail some sheets of structural plywood to it and the problem is basically solved.) The traditional way to combat the latter is to design spaces that admit a lot of sunlight and ventilation through that narrow piece of frontage. But that openness doesn’t jive with shear walls, which by definition are clad. Here with the solution is architect Kiyoshi Kasai and his ” Wooden Box 212 ” construction method, which uses wood yet enables large, column- and partition-free spaces. As he describes the issue (roughly translated from Japanese), With narrow-frontage urban housing there is a conflict with providing a window for lighting, ventilation and entrance and reconciling that with a shear wall on the same side…. The design preference in recent years has been to seek a sense of transparency and openness via a wide opening in the outer wall surface of the housing, but achieving this with conventional wood is difficult. (more…)