Self-Assembly Lab

Self-Assembly Lab
Author: Skylar Tibbits
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317437020
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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.

Active Matter

Active Matter
Author: Skylar Tibbits
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262036800
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The first book on active matter, an emerging field focused on programming physical materials to assemble themselves, transform autonomously, and react to information. The past few decades brought a revolution in computer software and hardware; today we are on the cusp of a materials revolution. If yesterday we programmed computers and other machines, today we program matter itself. This has created new capabilities in design, computing, and fabrication, which allow us to program proteins and bacteria, to generate self-transforming wood products and architectural details, and to create clothing from “intelligent textiles” that grow themselves. This book offers essays and sample projects from the front lines of the emerging field of active matter. Active matter and programmable materials are at the intersection of science, art, design, and engineering, with applications in fields from biology and computer science to architecture and fashion. These essays contextualize current work and explore recent research. Sample projects, generously illustrated in color, show the range of possibilities envisioned by their makers. Contributors explore the design of active material at scales from nano to micro, kilo, and even planetary. They investigate processes of self-assembly at a microscopic level; test new materials that can sense and actuate themselves; and examine the potential of active matter in the built environment and in living and artificial systems. Active Matter is an essential guide to a field that could shape the future of design.

Things Fall Together

Things Fall Together
Author: Skylar Tibbits
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0691189714
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From the visionary founder of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, a manifesto for the dawning age of active materials Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world. Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself—and along the way help us build a more sustainable future. Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider's perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own.

Being Material

Being Material
Author: Marie-Pier Boucher
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262043289
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Explorations of the many ways of being material in the digital age. In his oracular 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte predicted that social relations, media, and commerce would move from the realm of “atoms to bits”—that human affairs would be increasingly untethered from the material world. And yet in 2019, an age dominated by the digital, we have not quite left the material world behind. In Being Material, artists and technologists explore the relationship of the digital to the material, demonstrating that processes that seem wholly immaterial function within material constraints. Digital technologies themselves, they remind us, are material things—constituted by atoms of gold, silver, silicon, copper, tin, tungsten, and more. The contributors explore five modes of being material: programmable, wearable, livable, invisible, and audible. Their contributions take the form of reports, manifestos, philosophical essays, and artist portfolios, among other configurations. The book's cover merges the possibilities of paper with those of the digital, featuring a bookmark-like card that, when “seen” by a smartphone, generates graphic arrangements that unlock films, music, and other dynamic content on the book's website. At once artist's book, digitally activated object, and collection of scholarship, this book both demonstrates and chronicles the many ways of being material. Contributors Christina Agapakis, Azra Akšamija, Sandy Alexandre, Dewa Alit, George Barbastathis, Maya Beiser, Marie-Pier Boucher, Benjamin H. Bratton, Hussein Chalayan, Jim Cybulski, Tal Danino, Deborah G. Douglas, Arnold Dreyblatt, M. Amah Edoh, Michelle Tolini Finamore, Team Foldscope and Global Foldscope community, Ben Fry, Victor Gama, Stefan Helmreich, Hyphen-Labs, Leila Kinney, Rebecca Konte, Winona LaDuke, Brendan Landis, Grace Leslie, Bill Maurer, Lucy McRae, Tom Özden-Schilling, Trevor Paglen, Lisa Parks, Nadya Peek, Claire Pentecost, Manu Prakash,Casey Reas, Paweł Romańczuk, Natasha D. Schüll, Nick Shapiro, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, Evan Ziporyn Book Design: E Roon Kang Electronics, interactions, and product designer: Marcelo Coelho

Protein Self-Assembly

Protein Self-Assembly
Author: Jennifer J. McManus
Publisher: Humana
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2020-08-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781493996803
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This volume explores experimental and computational approaches to measuring the most widely studied protein assemblies, including condensed liquid phases, aggregates, and crystals. The chapters in this book are organized into three parts: Part One looks at the techniques used to measure protein-protein interactions and equilibrium protein phases in dilute and concentrated protein solutions; Part Two describes methods to measure kinetics of aggregation and to characterize the assembled state; and Part Three details several different computational approaches that are currently used to help researchers understand protein self-assembly. Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Thorough and cutting-edge, Protein Self-Assembly: Methods and Protocols is a valuable resource for researchers who are interested in learning more about this developing field.

Lab-on-Fiber Technology

Lab-on-Fiber Technology
Author: Andrea Cusano
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2014-07-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319069985
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This book focuses on a research field that is rapidly emerging as one of the most promising ones for the global optics and photonics community: the “lab-on-fiber” technology. Inspired by the well-established "lab on-a-chip" concept, this new technology essentially envisages novel and highly functionalized devices completely integrated into a single optical fiber for both communication and sensing applications. Based on the R&D experience of some of the world's leading authorities in the fields of optics, photonics, nanotechnology, and material science, this book provides a broad and accurate description of the main developments and achievements in the lab-on-fiber technology roadmap, also highlighting the new perspectives and challenges to be faced. This book is essential for scientists interested in the cutting-edge fiber optic technology, but also for graduate students.

The Self-Assembling Brain

The Self-Assembling Brain
Author: Peter Robin Hiesinger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2022-12-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0691241694
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"In this book, Peter Robin Hiesinger explores historical and contemporary attempts to understand the information needed to make biological and artificial neural networks. Developmental neurobiologists and computer scientists with an interest in artificial intelligence - driven by the promise and resources of biomedical research on the one hand, and by the promise and advances of computer technology on the other - are trying to understand the fundamental principles that guide the generation of an intelligent system. Yet, though researchers in these disciplines share a common interest, their perspectives and approaches are often quite different. The book makes the case that "the information problem" underlies both fields, driving the questions that are driving forward the frontiers, and aims to encourage cross-disciplinary communication and understanding, to help both fields make progress. The questions that challenge researchers in these fields include the following. How does genetic information unfold during the years-long process of human brain development, and can this be a short-cut to create human-level artificial intelligence? Is the biological brain just messy hardware that can be improved upon by running learning algorithms in computers? Can artificial intelligence bypass evolutionary programming of "grown" networks? These questions are tightly linked, and answering them requires an understanding of how information unfolds algorithmically to generate functional neural networks. Via a series of closely linked "discussions" (fictional dialogues between researchers in different disciplines) and pedagogical "seminars," the author explores the different challenges facing researchers working on neural networks, their different perspectives and approaches, as well as the common ground and understanding to be found amongst those sharing an interest in the development of biological brains and artificial intelligent systems"--

Self Assembly

Self Assembly
Author: John A. Pelesko
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2007-05-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1584886889
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Hailed as one of the key areas of nanoscience likely to shape future scientific research, self-assembly offers the most promising route to true molecular nanotechnology. Focusing on this dynamic new field, Self Assembly: The Science of Things That Put Themselves Together explores nature's self-assembly of structures, the use of it to build engineer

Homing the Machine in Architecture

Homing the Machine in Architecture
Author: Galo Canizares
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2024-03-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1003829260
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Homing the Machine in Architecture is a series of conversations on the ways designers, practitioners, historians, and theorists orient themselves within the world of architectural digital fabrication. To “home” a digital fabrication machine is to send it back to its origin point—a point that can be specified by the fabricator in advance of the fabrication process or by the defaults that are pre-programmed into the machine. The homing process is necessary and productive since it determines the physical point at which the machine (and the maker) begin making—every time that architectural designers begin to digitally fabricate something new, they first need to home the machine. This book gathers first- and second-hand accounts of the origins of individual “digi-fab” practices from the emergence of advanced prototyping tools to the contemporary moment. It features interviews, essays, and case studies organized around three questions: What are the possible histories of digital fabrication in architecture? How do designers orient themselves in this emergent discipline? What conceptual original points do architectural designers return to when they home their machines? The discourse that emerges from this collection aims to reach practicing architects using digital fabrication, as well as upper-level students and academics of digital architecture, architectural theory, and architectural history.

Autonomous Assembly

Autonomous Assembly
Author: Skylar Tibbits
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2017-11-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1119102359
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We are now on the brink of a new era in construction – that of autonomous assembly. For some time, the widespread adoption of robotic and digital fabrication technologies has made it possible for architects and academic researchers to design non-standard, highly customised structures. These technologies have largely been limited by scalability, focusing mainly on top-down, bespoke fabrication projects, such as experimental pavilions and structures. Autonomous assembly and bottom-up construction techniques hold the promise of greater scalability, adaptability and potentially evolved design possibilities. By capitalising on the advances made in swarm robotics, the collective construction of the animal/insect kingdom, and advances in physical computational, programmable materials or self-assembly, architects and designers are now able to build from the bottom up. This issue presents future scenarios of autonomous assembly by highlighting the viability of decentralised, collective assembly systems, demonstrating the potential to deliver reconfigurable and adaptive solutions. Contributors include: Marcelo Coelho, Andong Liu, Robin Meier, Kieran Murphy and Heinrich Jaeger, Radhika Nagpal and Kirstin Petersen, and Zorana Zeravcic. Featured architects: Aranda\Lasch, Arup, Philippe Block, Gramazio Kohler Architects, Ibañez Kim, Achim Menges, Caitlin Mueller, Jose Sanchez, Athina Papadopoulou and Jared Laucks, and Skylar Tibbits.