4D Printing, Volume 1

3Who Would Prevail Today from Lamarck or Darwin to Help the Controlled Evolution of 4D Printing?

What is striking is that many discoveries can often appear to be the result of “happy coincidences”. But history teaches us that only minds prepared by their intellectual and scientific past can benefit from these chances, allowing them to be surprised by an unusual fact that escapes the majority. (Denis 2007)

Preamble

With the concept of informed matter, there should be the possibility of changing the form and functionality of objects over time (4D printing), to print living matter (bio-printing), etc. This last area will not be covered in this book, but the interested reader can find information in André (2017c, 2021). By adding time to the mastery of the spatial approach already allowed by 3D printing, research and breaking with traditions of incremental innovation can lead (thanks to a little creativity and epistemic deepening) to huge markets (relative to the current “modest” market of the order of a few tens of billions of euros/year). However, if it is possible to build objects containing different materials that can be activated by additive manufacturing technologies (homogeneous, hybrid or heterogeneous), the question of mastering a 4D transformation that meets the designer’s specifications is raised here. At the same time, as this chapter deals with the control of temporal evolution, a parallel with natural processes and associated theories is made, allowing a comparison ...