Self-Assembly Lab

The Self-Assembly Lab is a cross-disciplinary research lab at MIT composed of designers, scientists and engineers inventing self-assembly technologies aimed at reimagining the processes of construction, manufacturing and assembly at all scale-lengths. The lab’s vision proposes new design processes, new assembly technologies and information-rich materials that seamlessly blend the worlds of digital computation and physical production.

As new technologies push the boundaries of what we can create and we place higher demands on efficiency, energy and safety, we will need new methods to manufacture structures at all scales, from nano-scale to buildings and space infrastructure. Today, the building and construction industries contribute to one third of the total energy use globally as well as significant construction fatalities and increasing litigation. It is an industry that is plagued by outdated techniques and brute-force methodologies. Self-assembly and computational materials can reboot our methods of making, where factories and construction sites act more like self-organizing brains than brick-layers. The Self-Assembly Lab is inventing new materials, buildings, infrastructure and factories that can self-assemble, adapt and repair themselves for years to come.

Self-Assembly is a process by which disordered parts independently build an ordered structure through local interaction. We have demonstrated that this phenomenon is scale-independent and can be utilized for self-constructing and manufacturing systems at nearly every scale. We have also identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of responsive building blocks, energy and interactions that can be designed with nearly every material and machining process available. Self-assembly is the fundamental attribute of the most important natural processes in life as we know it, emerging in nearly every field and every scale-length. Self-assembly of manmade systems and processes promises to enable breakthroughs across every application of biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, construction, urban design, the arts, and even space exploration. The Self-Assembly Lab is working with academic, commercial, nonprofit, and government partners, collaborators, and sponsors to make our selfassembling future a reality.

As an educational lab, we offer new modes of learning by studying self-assembly phenomena with intuitive hands-on research and production, outside of disciplinary silos. The Self-Assembly Lab’s research-professionals, graduate and undergraduate students collaborate across disciplines at MIT, challenging conventions and exploring the boundaries of self-replication, self-assembly, self-repair and material computation.

As an applied research lab, we collaborate with leading industry partners, renowned galleries and a wide range of public and private institutions on projects including software/hardware design tools for self-assembly systems, self-adapting water management systems, transforming space infrastructure, multi-material rapid prototyping, interactive commercial retail, self-assembly toys, educational devices and many others. These collaborations are aimed at tackling large-scale challenges in construction, manufacturing, material adaptation and structural transformation. Our technological solutions are not always driven by sophisticated software or hardware; rather we utilize every-day, natural and synthetic, materials that are designed in unique configurations to respond to nearly any energy source for innovative self-assembly applications.