Responsive Material / Responsive Structure
Sean Hanna
University College London
http://www.sean.hanna.net/
Summary
Visionary designers and fiction writers speculate today about a future
environment of nanotechnology and ‘smart dust’, able to
create its form in response to external factors, or with an apparent
will of its own. Although the manipulation of individual molecules on
such a scale is still firmly in the realm of science fiction, this talk
presents current research that makes this a reality at the millimetre,
rather than the nanometre scale. Using digital simulation, artificial
intelligence, and rapid prototyping technologies, the microstructure
of manufactured objects can be made to optimise itself to accommodate
external physical loads or have desired dynamic properties, and can
actually learn to improve its performance.
The process simulates an interconnected lattice of intelligent structural
agents. All materials, while treated as continuous, have complex internal
structures that determine their properties: at the cellular level these
give wood its strength, at the molecular level differentiate diamond
from graphite. Just as each individual cell of living wood or bone is
a part of a distributed intelligence, genetically programmed to take
the form best suited to its particular relationship to other cells,
these structural agents each possess a modicum of intelligence that
allows the group to make such a computation quickly and efficiently.
Such principles can also be used in the analysis of human behaviour,
allowing the environment to respond to us. While less well understood,
social behaviour can be handled with similar models of complex systems
and machine learning. The new technology can yield objects made of a
material that shapes itself at the smallest level, or equally an intelligent
structure at the scale of city. With recent architectural projects in
excess of one kilometre and the enclosure of entire city neighbourhoods
becoming a reality, such an approach may help to form our environment
on a truly massive scale.
Biography
Sean Hanna is a research engineer at University College London, currently
investigating structural optimisation and rapid prototyping technology,
and developing computational methods for dealing with complex systems
in architecture. His background is initially in design, and work has
included projects with architects Foster and Partners, and sculptor
Antony Gormley. He obtained his professional architecture degree from
the University of Waterloo, and was awarded the AIA student gold medal
in 1998. He has also studied intelligent systems and virtual environments
at UCL, and published in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics
and optimisation of structures and materials.
