How might 4D printing overcome the obstacles that are hampering the rolling out and scaling up of 3D printing? Skylar Tibbits, Director of the Self‐Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), describes how the Lab has partnered up with Stratasys Ltd, an industry leader in the development of 4D Printing, and is making the development of self‐assembly programmable materials and adaptive technologies for industrial application in building design and construction its focus.

We propose a new design of complex self-evolving structures that vary over time due to environmental interaction. In conventional 3D printing systems, materials are meant to be stable rather than active and fabricated models are designed and printed as static objects. Here, we introduce a novel approach for simulating and fabricating self-evolving structures that transform into a predetermined shape, changing property and function after fabrication. The new locally coordinated bending primitives combine into a single system, allowing for a global deformation which can stretch, fold and bend given environmental stimulus.

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3D printing has captured the imagination of everyone from industry experts to at-home hobbyists.However, there are significant challenges that need to be addressed in order for 3D printing to have widespread adoption in construction and manufacturing. A new category of printing has recently been introduced, called 4D printing, which describes the ability for a material system or object to change form and/or function after printing. 4D printing offers a number of unique advantages over 3D printing that may prove to be the critical capability needed to catalyze widespread implementation. This paper attempts to go beyond existing capabilities in 4D printing to create precise and universal folding techniques that approach a wider range of applications through a series of radically new physical models. A number of physical and digital prototypes demonstrate major advances in 4D printing, including: custom angle-structures that can transform from any one shape into another rigid 3D structure, curved-crease origami for doubly curved surfaces and dynamic fields utilizing surface curling and gradient material distribution.

The increasing power of design software, the widespread availability of digital fabrication and growing complexity of our built environment are in stark contrast to the inefficient techniques that currently plague the construction industry. Today's processes of assembly can be fundamentally re‐imagined by looking at biological systems that are building structures with far more complexity, information capacity and assembly instructions than even the most advanced structures possible with current technologies. Skylar Tibbits explains that the key ingredient embedded within these natural systems is self‐assembly. He outlines four principles for designing systems that build themselves, and shows a number of projects that demonstrate first steps towards this new mode of architectural production. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.