careers, thus giving young researchers the opportunity both to learn

and to feel supported.

Provide support for a better worklife balance for young scientists, especially for women and individuals
with families.
Value all aspects of research and
dont expect individuals to excel at
everything. A healthy division of
labor may be more productive [for
research teams and individual members], the report states.
Ensure academic freedom while
maintaining a healthy balance between basic and applied research in
national and international funding
programs.
Facilitate and carry out further
global studies of young scientists to
enable institutions to learn from the
best practices in other regions of the
world.
A follow-up effort is under way at GYA
to determine responses to the survey.
However, GYA has already found a way
to respond to the reports final recommendation. We have secured funds to
run a GloSYS-ASEAN [project], which
will survey in early 2015 four countries
(so far): Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore,
and Thailand, Beaudry says. We will
also file a number of grant proposals for
a GloSYS-Africa to start a study on the
African Science system in the summer
2015. These two studies will delve
more deeply into the similarities and
differences in the research experience
of young scientists in different regions,
as part of the global effort to share information on strategies that benefitand
hamperyoung scientists.
Peter Gwynne, Contributing Editor
Boston, Massachusetts
pgwynne767@aol.com

4D Printing Transforms
Product Design
Imagine a water pipe that can constrict
or expand in response to changes in water pressure or flow rate, or undulate to
move water, eliminating complex pumps

Perspectives

or mechanical valves. Or automobile

coatings that can change their structure
when the environment is wet or when
they come into contact with road salt. Or
military uniforms that change camouflage patterns when the soldier moves to
a different environment or harden into a
protective barrier when poison gas or
shrapnel is detected.
All of these may be possible with 4D
printing, the convergence of smart
materials and 3D printing technology,
which promises to change not only how
things get made but what they can do.
Change over time is the fourth dimension in 4D printing: programmable
materials developed for 3D printing
applications have the potential to produce adaptive products whose physical
properties alter when triggered by particular stimuli or that self-assemble or
self-modify over preprogrammed periods of time. Researchers believe this
work will stimulate R&D for smart sensors, coatings, textiles, and other structural components.
Researchers hope to develop materials that can be used in 3D printing
processes to build products that can
transform in programmed ways in response to specific environmental forces.
One team has nearly completed its first
samples of a class of adaptive composite
materials that mimic biochemical processes to alter their shape, physical properties, or functionality multiple times in
response to external stimuli. The team
includes Anna C. Balazs, professor of
chemical engineering in the University
of Pittsburghs Swanson School of Engineering; Jennifer A. Lewis, from the
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, an expert in 3D printing
of functional materials; and Ralph G.
Nuzzo, at the University of Illinois, a synthetic chemist and an expert in stimuliresponsive materials. As Balazs recently
told ZMEscience.com, the team has big
goals: By integrating our abilities to
print precise, three-dimensional, hierarchically-structured materials; synthesize stimuli-responsive components; and
predict the temporal behavior of the system, we expect to build the foundation
for the new field of 4D printing.
The scientist credited with coining
the term 4D printing, Skylar Tibbits, is

director of the Self-Assembly Lab at

MITs Department of Architecture. The
idea for 4D printing started about two
years ago, Tibbits said, to essentially
print smart materials, to be able to customize those smart materials in their
shape and their properties, to be able to
print them within objects so there
wasnt any assembly required to make
them sense or actuate or have logic. He
points to DARPAs programmable matter research of nearly a decade ago as
the big kick start of this whole vision.
The difference, he said, is that in the
early days, people thought in terms of
robotics: Almost everyone was doing
robotics. Robotics were the solution to
programmable matter, and I think over
time all of us have shifted into a much
softer, more adaptive, more responsive
vision of what programmable matter
is. This direction, he says, points to a
certain growing maturity in the field,
but new technologies have also enabled us to do what we wanted to do
and have eliminated the need to have
these super-heavy mechanical electronic
robots that we needed before, and its
much more elegant.
Tibbitss team is working on selfassembling materials, with self-assembly
defined as a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure
through local interaction. Researchers
there have identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of
responsive building blocks and some
environmental factorheat, light, pressure, magnetism, motion, even sound
or moisturewhose change generates
changes in the material. Tibbits and his
team want to coopt these natural forces
to program matter in controllable, dynamic ways. For example, Tibbits describes how self-tuning footwear might
adapt to changing performance needs.
Adaptive running shoes might work by
sensing changes in the running surface
or environment: a change from pavement to grass, sensed by the change in
impact force, might cue the shoes to
grow cleats. Increased moisture, due to
rain or wet grass, might induce a change
that makes the material waterproof or
provides additional traction.
The first step in creating such products
is finding ways to embed programmable

MarchApril 2015

| 7

materials in other materials used to make

things to create predictable changes.
The behavior of bacon has been suggested as a useful analogy. A flat strip
of raw bacon curls as it heats up because
the fat melts and shrinks at a different
rate than the muscle tissue. Design a
specific configuration of fat to muscle
and you can, theoretically, program the
bacon to curl in a specific pattern. Scientists have done this in nanotechnology, Tibbits points out, programming
physical and biological materials to
change shape and properties using selfassembling, DNA-based nanorobots. At
the human scale, the challenges are
different and the prototypes are very
simple. Still, self-assembly promises to
enable breakthroughs across diverse
fieldsbiology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction,
the arts, and even space exploration,
according to Tibbits.
Tibbits and his team are working on
ways to control and repeat these reactions by marbling controllable materials with conventional materials. 3D
printing suggests one way that might
be done. In 3D printing, the printer
builds an object layer by layer, working
from a virtual blueprint, to create a
rigid, static object. In 4D printing,
which incorporates programmable materials into the printed object, the code
for the virtual blueprint includes an
additional element: a precise geometric mapping based on the objects angles and dimensions that determines
how it should change shape in the
presence of particular environmental
elementsheat, moisture, or magnetism, for instance. That additional code
determines how the responsive material is incorporated into the final, printed
object.

Under Tibbitss direction, the SelfAssembly Lab has partnered with a

number of companies to develop 4D
printing applications. One of the companies, Stratasys, has a specialized 3D
printer that can handle multiple materials. This allows one material to act as a
programmable skeletonwhose joints
can bend, flex, and swellthat flows
through an unbroken sheet of another
material. The programmable skeletal
material reacts to the activating energy
needed to transform the combined materials from one state to another. For
example, one of the researchers at the
Self-Assembly Lab has successfully 4D
printed a flattened sheet of composite
wood material that springs into the
shape of an Eames Elephant wooden
toy as it dries.
Tibbits is also working with the software company Autodesk, through the
companys Bio/Nano/Programmable
Matter research group. Autodesks own
Project Cyborg was created to work on
merging the research and development
being done in this and other fields to develop new software tools that simulate
new applications across disparate domains, from manufacturing to biology.
The research is attracting interest
from industry, Tibbits said. Airplane
maker Airbus is looking at the technology as a new way to regulate airflow to
airplane engines. Lightweight, programmable carbon fiber composites that
respond to heat in a way that controls
airflow can eliminate complex, failureprone equipment like sensors, electronics, and batteries. Carbitex, a startup
based in Kennewick, Washington, has
developed novel carbon fiber composites that bend by incorporating matrix
materials that are floppy like a cotton
sheet or springy like sheet metal. British automobile manufacturer Briggs

Automotive Company, which is working to make the worlds fastest streetlegal car, has expressed interest in using
the technology to develop a self-tuning
airfoil that bends when conditions are
wet to improve traction and curls back
when the track is dry, to allow for more
speed.
The practical applications are nearly
limitless, Tibbits said. Furniture, footwear, construction, building materials
manufacturers, even private space companies are looking at programmable
materials. And Tibbits points out that
not all of these new materials applications need to be 4D printed. Down the
road, maybe not every application
needs to be printed, he said. Rather
we can start to use other industrial processes, like lamination or weaving or
knitting or extrusion. Theres a much
broader discussion about how we program every single material. How do we
program materials that arent printed?
For now, 4D printing suggests a dramatic extension of 3D printing, allowing the technology to create dynamic,
self-modifying objects. From a wider
perspective, the integration of smart
materials into 3D printing and other
fabrication processes sets the stage for a
profound revision of how we think
about and interact with the products we
live with every day. As 4D printing leads
to products that can adapt independently to changing environments, without relying on complex motors and
sensors, a new kind of interaction between humans and the physical world
might be imagined, perhaps leading to
what Tibbits calls a world of robots
without robots.
Dan Headrick, Contributing Editor
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
dan.headrick1@gmail.com

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Perspectives

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