Self-Assembly Lab

Experiments in Programming Matter

Skylar Tibbits

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317437017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

What if structures could build themselves or adapt to fluctuating environments? Skylar Tibbits, Director of the Self-Assembly Lab in the Department of Architecture at MIT, Cambridge, MA, crosses the boundaries between architecture, biology, materials science and the arts, to envision a world where material components can self-assemble to provide adapting structures and optimized fabrication solutions. The book examines the three main ingredients for self-assembly, includes interviews with practitioners involved in the work and presents research projects related to these topics to provide a complete first look at exciting future technologies in construction and self-transforming material products.

Ingredients—II Machanics and Interaction

Chapter 4—Self-Assembly Studio

Department of Architecture, MIT

Chapter 5—Hyperform

Skylar Tibbits with Marcelo Coelho and FormLabs Inc.

Chapter 6—BioMolecular and Chiral Self-Assembly

Skylar Tibbits, Arthur Olson, and Autodesk Inc.

The second ingredient for self-assembly is the physical mechanics and interaction of the components. Beyond the material property and the geometric patterns that we explored in the first section, the mechanics are important in order to dictate how structures transform from one state to another and to regulate how building blocks can assemble into larger structures. There are two types of interaction of physical objects:

1. Material parts that are designed in pre-connected configurations such as strands, fibers, sheet materials, and cast objects that can be designed to change shape and appearance through their mechanical joints. We have designed a library of mechanical joints that allow folding, curling, shrinking, expanding, and other active material transformations.
2. Autonomous components that are moving around and need to find one another, connect or disconnect and then error-correct. This type of interaction describes the traditional model of self-assembly where individual parts need to assemble into precise structures without human interaction or “guided” energy. This is the logical anti-thesis to human assembly or robotic assembly that requires skilled placement and directed energy to go from arbitrary components into a final form. Self-assembly allows materials to spontaneously assemble without pick-and-place guidance. One of the key components that make self-assembly useful as a manufacturing process is error-correction.

We have demonstrated the principle of self-assembl...