Year: 2024

While working as a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Architecture, Skylar Tibbits SM ’10 was also building art installations in galleries all over the world. Most of these installations featured complex structures created from algorithmically designed and computationally fabricated parts, building off Tibbits’ graduate work at the Institute.

Late one night in 2011 he was working with his team for hours — painstakingly riveting and bolting together thousands of tiny parts — to install a corridor-spanning work called VoltaDom at MIT for the Institute’s 150th anniversary celebration.

“There was a moment during the assembly when I realized this was the opposite of what I was interested in. We have elegant code for design and fabrication, but we didn’t have elegant code for construction. How can we promote things to build themselves? That is where the research agenda for my lab really came into being,” he says.

Tibbits, now a tenured associate professor of design research, co-directs the Self-Assembly Lab in the Department of Architecture, where he and his collaborators study self-organizing systems, programmable materials, and transformable structures that respond to their environments.

His research covers a diverse range of projects, including furniture that autonomously assembles from parts dropped into a water tank, rapid 3D printing with molten aluminum, and programmable textiles that sense temperature and automatically adjust to cool the body.

“If you were to ask someone on the street about self-assembly, they probably think of IKEA. But that is not what we mean. I am not the ‘self’ that is going to assemble something. Instead, the parts should build themselves,” he says.

Creative foundations

As a child growing up near Philadelphia, the hands-on Tibbits did like to build things manually. He took a keen interest in art and design, inspired by his aunt and uncle who were both professional artists, and his grandfather, who worked as an architect.

Tibbits decided to study architecture at Philadelphia University (now called Thomas Jefferson University) and chose the institution based on his grandfather’s advice to pick a college that was strong in design.

“At that time, I didn’t really know what that meant,” he recalls, but it was good advice. Being able to think like a designer helped form his career trajectory and continues to fuel the work he and his collaborators do in the Self-Assembly Lab.

While he was studying architecture, the digitization boom was changing many aspects of the field. Initially he and his classmates were drafting by hand, but software and digital fabrication equipment soon overtook traditional methods.

Wanting to get ahead of the curve, Tibbits taught himself to code. He used equipment in a sign shop owned by the father of classmate Jared Laucks (who is now a research scientist and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab) to digitally fabricate objects before their school had the necessary machines.

Looking to further his education, Tibbits decided to pursue graduate studies at MIT because he wanted to learn computation from full-time computer scientists rather than architects teaching digital tools.

“I wanted to learn a different discipline and really enter a different world. That is what brought me to MIT, and I never left,” he says.

Tibbits earned dual master’s degrees in computer science and design and computation, delving deeper the theory of computation and the question of what it means to compute. He became interested in the challenge of embedding information into our everyday world.

One of his most influential experiences as a graduate student was a series of projects he worked on in the Center for Bits and Atoms that involved building reconfigurable robots.

“I wanted to figure out how to program materials to change shape, change properties, or assemble themselves,” he says.

He was pondering these questions as he graduated from MIT and joined the Institute as a lecturer, teaching studios and labs in the Department of Architecture. Eventually, he decided to become a research scientist so he could run a lab of his own.

“I had some prior experience in architectural practice, but I was really fascinated by what I was doing at MIT. It seemed like there were a million things I wanted to work on, so staying here to teach and do research was the perfect opportunity,” he says.

Launching a lab

As he was forming the Self-Assembly Lab, Tibbits had a chance meeting with someone wearing a Stratasys t-shirt at Flour Bakery and Café, near campus. (Stratasys is a manufacturer of 3D printers.)

A lightbulb went off in his head.

“I asked them, why can’t I print a material that behaves like a robot and just walks off the machine? Why can’t I print robots without adding electronics or motors or wires or mechanisms?” he says.

That idea gave rise to one of his lab’s earliest projects: 4D printing. The process involves using a multimaterial 3D printer to print objects designed to sense, actuate, and transform themselves over time.

To accomplish this, Tibbits and his team link material properties with a certain activation energy. For instance, moisture will transform cellulose, and temperature will activate polymers. The researchers fabricate materials into certain geometries so they can leverage these activation energies to transform the material in predictable and precise ways.

“It is almost like making everything a ‘smart’ material,” he says.

The lab’s initial 4D printing work has evolved to include different materials, such as textiles, and has led the team to invent new printing processes, such as rapid liquid printing and liquid metal printing.

They have used 4D printing in many applications, often working with industry partners. For instance, they collaborated with Airbus to develop thin blades that can fold and curl themselves to control the airflow to an airplane’s engine.

On an even greater scale, the team also embarked on a multiyear project in 2015 with the organization Invena in the Maldives to leverage self-assembly to “grow” small islands and rebuild beaches, which could help protect this archipelago from rising seas.

To do this, they fabricate submersible devices that, based on their geometry and the natural forces of the ocean like wave energy and tides, promote the accumulation of sand in specific areas to become sand bars.

They have now created nine field installations in the Maldives, the largest of which measures approximately 60 square meters. The end goal is to promote the self-organization of sand into protective barriers against sea level rise, rebuild beaches to fight erosion, and eliminate the need to dredge for land reclamation.

They are now working on similar projects in Iceland with J. Jih, associate professor of the practice in architectural design at MIT, looking at mountain erosion and volcanic lava flows, and Tibbits foresees many potential applications for self-assembly in natural environments.

“There are almost an unlimited number of places, and an unlimited number of forces that we could harness to tackle big, important problems, whether it is beach erosion or protecting communities from volcanoes,” he says.

Blending the radical and the relevant

Self-organizing sand bars are a prime example of a project that combines a radical idea with a relevant application, Tibbits says. He strives to find projects that strike such a balance and don’t only push boundaries without solving a real-world problem.

Working with brilliant and passionate researchers in the Self-Assembly Lab helps Tibbits stay inspired and creative as they launch new projects aimed at tackling big problems.

He feels especially passionate about his role as a teacher and mentor. In addition to teaching three or four courses each year, he directs the undergraduate design program at MIT.

Any MIT student can choose to major or minor in design, and the program focuses on many aspects and types of design to give students a broad foundation they can apply in their future careers.

“I am passionate about creating polymath designers at MIT who can apply design to any other discipline, and vice-versa. I think my lab is the ethos of that, where we take creative approaches and apply them to research, and where we apply new principles from different disciplines to create new forms of design,” he says.

Outside the lab and classroom, Tibbits often finds inspiration by spending time on the water. He lives at the beach on the North Shore of Massachusetts and is a surfer, a hobby he had dabbled in during his youth, but which really took hold after he moved to the Bay State for graduate school.

“It is such an amazing sport to keep you in tune with the forces of the ocean. You can’t control the environment, so to ride a wave you have to find a way to harness it,” he says.