What Technology Can Learn From Biology: Can humans design products that assemble (and disassemble) themselves?

• Author: Kelly, Kevin
• Position: BOOKS - Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution

WE HOPE THE things we make stay together. We prefer that our bridges never move, that our buildings don't sway, that our shoes remain sturdy. The highest compliment we might give to something we made is that it could outlive us. This sense of solid fixity has been the north star for engineers and designers forever. As a result, our built world is composed of artifacts and structures that are laboriously assembled to consistently work with little degradation in service over their lifespans. Even when they are obsolete, they are hard to get rid of.

In contrast to this model of perfect design, Skylar Tibbits outlines a very different mode inspired by biology. Instead of manufacturing finished polished products, he argues, we can use technology to create things the way nature does. We can grow artifacts that self-assemble, adapt, self-repair, evolve, and disassemble themselves when done. Tibbits' optimism that such a path is possible is based on his team's research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and by research at other laboratories around the world. In Things Fall Together, he reports on early experiments that demonstrate these crazy ideas are at least possible, and probably doable, and very much desirable.

The general idea of technology mimicking biology is not new. Some of the earliest working prototypes date back to the 1950s, when scientists constructed small setups that would encourage components to self-assemble. Tibbits continues this line of research in his own Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. In the book he recounts the many ingenious ways his lab can design systems so that simple dumb parts will smartly "fall together" into a complex structure on their own. In many designs, the material itself is what permits the self-assembly; as it is heated, shaken, or pressurized, it changes shape, or links with other pieces, or through dozens of other behaviors falls together with other pieces to form a new thing. Tibbits comes to think of this stuff as "active materials"--or even better, as "programmed matter."

The best of what Tibbits and colleagues can do in their labs pales in comparison to what even the simplest bacteria can do as it grows. But today is just the dawn, akin to the very first years of computerdom, so we should pay attention to the potential. The thrust of this short book is to catalog what is possible.

Rather than centralized factories churning out finished polished products, for example, why not have things...