Smart components that assemble themselves
Friday, April 25, 2014 - 07:01
in Biology & Nature
Skylar Tibbits SM '10 was constructing a massive museum installation with thousands of pieces when he had an epiphany. "Imagine yourself facing months on end assembling this thing, thinking there's got to be a better way," he says. A designer and architect, Tibbits was accustomed to modeling and fabricating his complex, architecturally sophisticated sculptures with computation. It suddenly struck him: "With all this information that was used to design the structure and communicate with fabrication machines, there's got to be a way these parts can build themselves."