3Material-Process Duality in Industrial 4D Printing

We are in a world of “Sunday drivers”, as George Friedmann writes, “of Men who have never looked at their engine, and for whom things have not only but for mystery to function”. (Baudrillard 2001)

The famous pure/applied dichotomy has an assignable origin: it dates from the 1750s and was invented by a Swedish chemist, Johan Gottschalk Wallerius (1709-1785). […] The notions of pure and applied allow for a strategic reversal […] in favor of a logical dependence of the arts on science. […] The purity of science is a purely ideological notion. (Bensaude-Vincent 2009)

3.1. Introduction

Henry Le Chatelier (1850–1936) wanted to organize scientific research on the model of an industrial enterprise (Le Chatelier 1925). He envisaged a cost/benefit evaluation of scientific production according to the innovations that it could allow for the national industry, with essentially a certain obligation of results (this is not exactly what the authors have observed in their present analysis of publications concerning 4D printing). It is against this model that Jean Perrin elaborated the concept of “pure science” because science must remain a creative, disinterested activity, which has its own internal purpose. It is on this basis that the CNRS was created in France before the beginning of the Second World War. It is not a question here of returning to debates on “research that finds” but rather of examining how one can go from an idea (supposedly ...

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