ORIGINAL: FastCo Exist
With 4-D printing, Skylar Tibbits and the Self Assembly Lab are printing materials that fold, transform, and shape themselves, and could adapt to changing environmental conditions. No assembly required.
His Self Assembly Lab is working with engineering firm Geosyntec, to explore programmable water infrastructure. “The idea is these pipes would expand or contract to either pinch water, expand for capacity or potentially undulate to move water,” Tibbits says. Think of it--a water main that knew whether it needed to shrink or expand and could prevent burst pipes and eliminate pumps and valves.
With 3-D printing reaching the mainstream, Tibbits’s vision for 4-D printing isn’t exclusive to large problems either: “We want to try to find more elegant solutions to have smarter systems in interacting and making things on your own.”
With 4-D printing, Skylar Tibbits and the Self Assembly Lab are printing materials that fold, transform, and shape themselves, and could adapt to changing environmental conditions. No assembly required.
When Skylar Tibbits drops a plastic-like rod into a tub of water, it starts to take shape, turning into a cube. It’s a result of what he calls 4-D printing, which adds the fourth dimension, time, to the increasingly popular process of 3-D printing. Over the time dimension, the objects self-assemble. But this isn’t like adding water to shrunken animal-shaped sponges and watching them grow.
This notion of self-assembly seems futuristic, but it’s been researched before, particularly within the field of nanotechnology. And Tibbits, along with collaborators Stratasys Ltd. and Autodesk, sees the potential to use 4-D printed objects to solve larger efficiency problems in disaster relief or the oil and gas industries.
His Self Assembly Lab is working with engineering firm Geosyntec, to explore programmable water infrastructure. “The idea is these pipes would expand or contract to either pinch water, expand for capacity or potentially undulate to move water,” Tibbits says. Think of it--a water main that knew whether it needed to shrink or expand and could prevent burst pipes and eliminate pumps and valves.
With 3-D printing reaching the mainstream, Tibbits’s vision for 4-D printing isn’t exclusive to large problems either: “We want to try to find more elegant solutions to have smarter systems in interacting and making things on your own.”
A cross-disciplinary research lab at MIT composed of designers, scientists and engineers inventing self-assembly technologies aimed at reimagining processes of construction, manufacturing and assembly at all scale-lengths.
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.
For more information, please contact us at sjet at mit.edu
About the Director
Skylar Tibbits is a trained Architect, Designer, Computer Scientist and Artist whose research focuses on developing self-assembly and programmable material technologies for industrial applications in our built environment. Skylar is currently a faculty member in MIT's Department of Architecture, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and co-teaching How to Make (Almost) Anything, a seminar at MIT's Media Lab. Skylar was recently awarded a 2013 Architectural League Prize, The Next Idea Award at Ars Electronica 2013, the Visionary Innovation Award at the Manufacturing Leadership Summit, a 2012 TED Senior Fellowship and was named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine’s 2008 Design Issue. Previously, he has worked at a number of renowned design offices including: Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture and Point b Design. He has designed and built large-scale installations around the world, including locations in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Calgary, Berlin, Frankfurt, Long Beach, Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has also exhibited work at prestigious institutions, including; The Guggenheim Museum NY, the Beijing Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture and lectured at MoMA and SEED Media Group's MIND08 Conference. He has been published extensively online and in print outlets such as the New York Times, Wired, Nature, Fast Company, various peer-reviewed journals and books including: Fabricate: Making Digital Architecture, Digital Architecture, Testing to Failure, Scripting Cultures and Form + Code. As a guest critic, Skylar has guest lectured at schools around the world including; The University of Pennsylvania, The Institute for Computational Design, The Architectural Association, Pratt Institute and Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Skylar has a Professional. Bachelor of Architecture degree and minor in experimental computation from Philadelphia University. Continuing his education at MIT, he received a Masters of Science in Design + Computation and a Masters of Science in Computer Science under the guidance of advisors; Patrick Winston, Neil Gershenfeld, Erik Demaine and Terry Knight.
Skylar is also the founder and principal of a multidisciplinary architecture, art and design practice, SJET LLC. Started in 2007 as platform for experimental computation and design, SJET has grown into a research-based practice crossing disciplines from architecture, design, sculpture, fabrication, computer science, toys to robotics.
A number of influential collaborations include:
Neil Gershenfeld, Director of The Center for Bits and Atoms | Arthur Olson, Director of the Molecular Graphics Lab at The Scripps Research Institute | Shelly Linor, Daniel Dikovsky and Shai Hirsch of Stratasys | Carlos Olguin, Director of the Bio/Nano Programmable Matter Research Group at Autodesk | Erik and Marty Demaine at MIT, CSAIL | Adam Bly, CEO of SEED Media Group | Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, Principals of Aranda/Lasch | Matt Trimble, Principal of RadLab | Marc Fornes, Principal of THEVERYMANY | Jared Laucks, Brandon Kruysman, Jonathan Proto and many others....
Skylar Tibbits is a trained Architect, Designer, Computer Scientist and Artist whose research focuses on developing self-assembly and programmable material technologies for industrial applications in our built environment. Skylar is currently a faculty member in MIT's Department of Architecture, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and co-teaching How to Make (Almost) Anything, a seminar at MIT's Media Lab. Skylar was recently awarded a 2013 Architectural League Prize, The Next Idea Award at Ars Electronica 2013, the Visionary Innovation Award at the Manufacturing Leadership Summit, a 2012 TED Senior Fellowship and was named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine’s 2008 Design Issue. Previously, he has worked at a number of renowned design offices including: Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture and Point b Design. He has designed and built large-scale installations around the world, including locations in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Calgary, Berlin, Frankfurt, Long Beach, Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has also exhibited work at prestigious institutions, including; The Guggenheim Museum NY, the Beijing Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture and lectured at MoMA and SEED Media Group's MIND08 Conference. He has been published extensively online and in print outlets such as the New York Times, Wired, Nature, Fast Company, various peer-reviewed journals and books including: Fabricate: Making Digital Architecture, Digital Architecture, Testing to Failure, Scripting Cultures and Form + Code. As a guest critic, Skylar has guest lectured at schools around the world including; The University of Pennsylvania, The Institute for Computational Design, The Architectural Association, Pratt Institute and Harvard's Graduate School of Design.
Skylar has a Professional. Bachelor of Architecture degree and minor in experimental computation from Philadelphia University. Continuing his education at MIT, he received a Masters of Science in Design + Computation and a Masters of Science in Computer Science under the guidance of advisors; Patrick Winston, Neil Gershenfeld, Erik Demaine and Terry Knight.
Skylar is also the founder and principal of a multidisciplinary architecture, art and design practice, SJET LLC. Started in 2007 as platform for experimental computation and design, SJET has grown into a research-based practice crossing disciplines from architecture, design, sculpture, fabrication, computer science, toys to robotics.
A number of influential collaborations include:
Neil Gershenfeld, Director of The Center for Bits and Atoms | Arthur Olson, Director of the Molecular Graphics Lab at The Scripps Research Institute | Shelly Linor, Daniel Dikovsky and Shai Hirsch of Stratasys | Carlos Olguin, Director of the Bio/Nano Programmable Matter Research Group at Autodesk | Erik and Marty Demaine at MIT, CSAIL | Adam Bly, CEO of SEED Media Group | Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, Principals of Aranda/Lasch | Matt Trimble, Principal of RadLab | Marc Fornes, Principal of THEVERYMANY | Jared Laucks, Brandon Kruysman, Jonathan Proto and many others....
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