Finding a sweet spot between radical and relevant

As he invents programmable materials and self-organizing systems, Skylar Tibbits is pushing design boundaries while also solving real-world problems.

By Adam Zewe | MIT News

Nov 14, 2024

This article was originally published on MIT News on November 3, 2024. Skylar Tibbits is MAD's assistant director for education.

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

Photo: Adam Glanzman

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.

Read the full article on MIT News.