Alive. Active. Adaptive: Experiential Knowledge and Emerging Materials

摘要

The definition of materials in design today is more extensivethan ever. Designers add computational programmabilityto conventional materials like wood and plastics to developmaterial compositions that are more expressive in form andfunction (Vallga?rda & Redstro?m, 2007; Ishii, Lakatos, Bonanni,& Labrune, 2012). They collaborate with micro-organisms,guiding their growth and forging the conditions in which amaterial can be created (see for an overview, Myers, 2012;Camere & Karana, 2018). Inspired by how a plant root spreadsto find light and nutrition, Diana Scherer directs the growth ofplant roots to develop textile-like materials with a self-developedtechnique (Figure 1). The BioLogic project by the MIT TangibleMedia Group (Yao et al., 2015) explores responsive clothing,whose dozens of tiny triangular flaps react to heat and humiditydue to the trillion or so single-cell organisms embedded into thefabric. In the figure shown here, it is this bacteria that causes thegarment to change shape within seconds or even millisecondsin response to humidity (Figure 2). Using a 3D printer withstandard hardware, Morphing Matter Lab researchers (Wang etal., 2018) have replaced the machine’s open-source software withcode that automatically calculates the print speed and patternsnecessary to achieve particular folding angles. Their self-foldingplastic objects are the first step toward products, such as flat-packfurniture, which can assume their final shape with the help of aheat gun (Figure 3).