From synthesizing proteins to fabricating architectural-scale structures, assembling building blocks into larger, more complex configurations typically requires precision and deliberate choices for placement. What if this placement and the resulting adjacencies are instead determined by chance? What if the building blocks now develop their own agency — where they can adapt and find their own responses to structural or environmental stimuli? In this talk, Heinrich Jaeger will discuss how such aleatory assembly has led to a new framework for understanding how mechanical rigidity can emerge even in completely disordered structures, and how it has spawned applications ranging from new classes of soft robotic systems to loadbearing architectural structures that are adaptable, reconfigurable, and fully recyclable.

This lecture is part of the Design Tech Public Lecture Series.