MIT Unveils 4-D Printing

Skylar Tibbits, a trained architect, designer, computer scientist, as well as a TED2012 Senior Fellow, recently presented a new concept at TED2013: 4-D printing—where materials can be reprogrammed to self-assemble into new structures. Apparently, this is just the tip of the iceberg in manufacturing with minimum energy consumption.

“If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms,” noted Tibbits.