Intrigued? In the TED talk in March 2011, Skylar Tibbits a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) introduces to the idea of self assembly manufacture – where machinery and buildings will assembly, replicate and repair themselves by themselves.
The MIT researcher compares current present day manufacturing – Skyscrapers which take 2½ years to build and can be made up of 500,000 to a million parts of materials like steel and concrete, to natural systems like DNA which is made up of 3 million base pairs that can replicate itself in a hour.
Tibbits theorizes that the behaviour of materials of natural systems could be translated to the building environment, creating materials such as bricks or metal that once programmed can learn to build, replicate and repair themselves. The key to this being: decoding the complexity of self-replication into sequences; programming of individual parts to actuate those sequences; providing the energy that would be needed to make the parts actuate and creating a system for error correction.
In this talk we are shown three conceptual projects from the MIT research lab that gives a sense of how self – replicating materials might be produced. The projects included Desobot – an 8 foot robot that borrowed its structure from natural proteins found in living organisms. Embedded with mechanical electrical devices and sensors, you de-code what shape you want the protein to fold into using sequences of angles and codes.
The most interesting of these concepts was Biased Chains. A simple chain made up identical elements (links), much like a DNA strand. These links are programmed to turn either left or right, so when shaken the links react in the way they were initially programmed to behave without any further external input.
This research is exciting and holds a wealth of new possibilities for design and the programming material in the environment. Imagine computing the bricks of a bridge enabling the bridge to carry out its own maintenance without human input.
The advantages of this technology are clear; saving time, energy, man power, maximising efficiency and building material. And yet, although this technology claims to have taken inspiration from the natural system, I can’t help thinking that maybe a key factor was overlooked – people.
One of the greatest achievements of the 20th century was mass production - making manufacturing more accurate, more efficient and cheaper. However the downside to mass production is the reduced need and in some cases the loss of skilled labour. People working in manufacturing factories were replaced by machinery that could do their jobs more efficiently and for a fraction of the price.
If self-replication is the future of construction I can’t help thinking about the skilled labourers – builders, brick layers, black smiths, plasterers, painters, electricians which might become obsolete in the face of new technology.
