Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution

by Skylar Tibbits

From the visionary founder of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, a manifesto for the dawning age of active materials

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.

Drawing on his pioneering work on self-assembly and programmable material technologies, Skylar Tibbits lays out the core, frequently counterintuitive ideas and strategies that animate this new approach to design and innovation. From furniture that builds itself to shoes printed flat that jump into shape to islands that grow themselves, he describes how matter can compute and exhibit behaviors that we typically associate with biological organisms, and challenges our fundamental assumptions about what physical materials can do and how we can interact with them. Intelligent products today often rely on electronics, batteries, and complicated mechanisms. Tibbits offers a different approach, showing how we can design simple and elegant material intelligence that may one day animate and improve itself―and along the way help us build a more sustainable future.

Compelling and beautifully designed, Things Fall Together provides an insider's perspective on the materials revolution that lies ahead, revealing the spectacular possibilities for designing active materials that can self-assemble, collaborate, and one day even evolve and design on their own.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Engineering, Technology

224 pages, Hardcover

Published June 15, 2021

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for work, was teaching some 4D printing in my intro to 3D printing class and this provided some good examples. Enough that I recommended it to students researching soft robotics and 4D printing work.

[Leonard Tang · Rating 3 out of 5]

skylar is an artist and visionary; it is not difficult for your imagination to run wild when following his lab's work

however this book alone is shallow and lacks technical details. it's like walking through a moma "science" exhibit

if you trace back to the original sources (the references are great thankfully) however you'll learn a ton. in that sense this is indeed a comprehensive "survey paper" of the field

personally: keen to learn more about DNA origami, rapid liquid printing, granular jamming, chemical morphogenesis

also, who is building a shared experimentation platform for materials scientists..?

[Chad T · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the privilege of hearing Skylar present at a conference at MIT. Brilliant mind of our generation and this book is a great look into the amazing work he and his partners are developing in their labs. I cannot wait to see what Skylar and his team comes up with next.

[Michael Zhou · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came into this book knowing approximately zero about materials science. I still know approximately zero, but this book showed some really interesting research into programmable materials in a very beginner-friendly way. Nice illustrations and it’s pretty satisfying how these materials work.

[Iamreddave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Various ways for materials to combine themselves together.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's OK to pique your interest in the subject but itself explains almost nothing. Sadly none of these new materials panned out yet but I have high hopes.

[Karl-johan Ingerslev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Opened up new modes of thinking about making. Cutting edge work.