4D Printing, Volume 2

1Getting Things Moving

Manufacturing, but not action or speech, always involves means and ends; in fact, the category of means and ends derives its legitimacy from the sphere of making and manufacturing, where a clearly reasonable end, the final product, determines and organizes everything that plays a role in the process – the material, the tools, the activity itself, even the people who participate in it; all of them become mere means to the end and are justified as such. (Arendt 1972)

Warning

In the 16th century, in his treatise on magic, Giordano Bruno had, among other ideas, a certain notion of reactivity and consequently of adaptive materials. Thus, he wrote:

If one resorts to the virtue of sympathy and antipathy of things, as when substances repel, transmute or attract other substances […], one rightly speaks of extra-natural magic. […] From these premises, it can be deduced that the magnet stone attracts by its very nature. Indeed, attraction is twofold: certain objects attract first of all by sympathy, as when parts move towards their whole, when what has a definite place joins its place… (Bruno 2020)

This chapter tries, however, to move away from any magical context by examining, as scientifically as possible, how by various stimulations a form can change spatially or in functionality, alone in a homogeneous way or by association with materials.

1.1. Introduction

The introduction of additive manufacturing in the 1980s transformed the manufacturing industry. ...