What if your Ikea desk could assemble itself? If Skylar Tibbits has his way, parts will someday put themselves together, better than you ever could.
Skylar Tibbits, a 2011 TED fellow, is presenting his project at this year’s TED conference. He previewed his work for Fast Company last week in his new lab, which is filled with art installations that hint at the epiphany that led to his obsession with self-assembly.
Sitting on a table in Skylar Tibbits’s lab, at MIT’s new Center for International Design, is a 200-gallon-fish tank–it’s large enough to hold one of Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks. If Tibbits’s experiment goes according to plan, within the next few weeks, it will be the scene of a sort of fractal monster movie. A 50-foot-long strand of coded mystery material will be dumped into the water-filled tank, and transform–without benefit of human hands!–into a sweet little 8-inch square Hilbert curve.
How long will it take? Nobody knows. (…)
via MIT’s New Self-Assembly Lab Is Building A Paradigm Shift To 4-D Manufacturing | Fast Company.
