Things Fall Together
Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution
by Skylar TibbitsPrinceton University Press, June 2021
Hardcover | 5-1/4 x 8 inches | 224 pages | 42 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780691170336 | $24.95
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
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.
Skylar Tibbits is founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab and Associate Professor of Design Research in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include Active Matter and Self-Assembly Lab: Experiments in Programming Matter. He lives in Boston.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
Without fail, every biennale, biennial, and other major architecture event features an installation that explores novel forms, materials, and/or technologies in architecture. The large, sometimes habitable installations tend to come from research departments at academic institutions that carry such names as Institute for Computational Design and Construction, Mediated Matter, Self-Assembly Lab, and Sustainable Construction, as well as less-telling names like Block Research Group and Gramazio Kohler Research.
One of my favorite such installations came from Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zürich and the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT: "Rock Print," which was on display at the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, in 2015. The four-legged sculpture was made of rocks held together with thread — no glue or mortar — with the whole thing put together in the gallery primarily by robots. The most fascinating aspect of it came after the Biennial, when the thread was unfurled and the whole construction reverted to its original state: a pile of rocks and a spool of thread. Disassembly, in other words, was as important as assembly, implying the possibility of prolonged, cradle-to-cradle reuse of other materials at larger scales.
In the credits for "Rock Print," the name Sklyar Tibbits follows Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler (them and a fourth, Andreas Thoma, comprised the leads on the project). Tibbits is founder and co-director of Self-Assembly Lab, whose purpose is stated simply as "inventing self-assembly and programmable material technologies," and whose research is focused on "Self-Assembly and Self-Organization," "Phase Change Materials," "Programmable Materials and 4D Printing," and "Transformable Structures." Needless to say, it's an ambitious lab that does work many people probably fail to grasp.
Things Fall Together is, in part, an effort to explain what the Self-Assembly Lab does to a wider public. As explained in the first, introductory chapter, "we seek to use simple materials and their relationships with environmental forces to design and create more active, adaptable, lifelike worlds around us." So instead of so-called "smart" technologies that require batteries, processors, apps, and the like, the output of the Self-Assembly Lab strives to be relatively "dumb," "programming" materials in ways that takes advantage of their natural properties, or tweaks those properties in ways that creates unexpected results. "Active matter" is the main term used throughout the book to describe "the expanded field of researchers that are programming materials ... to create highly active structures that can assemble or physically transform."
Subtitled "A Guide to the New Materials Revolution," Tibbits' book is a compact, highly readable explanation of the work carried out at the Self-Assembly Lab and some of the other like-minded labs and institutions around the world, such as those listed above. With chapter titles such as "Computing Is Physical," "Less Is Smart," "Robots without Robots," and "Reverse, Reuse, Recycle," Tibbits clearly wants readers to reverse their thinking of computing and programming as "virtual," instead arguing for the importance of physical and environmental factors in how materials can be assembled and communicate with each other and with their surroundings. It's a premise I find hard to resist, even though I know it will be a long time before the ideas embedded with "Rock Print" and similar installations find larger application.