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printed material could be. If you've ever had your car bumper break off because
you backed into a bush at the end of the driveway (speaking from experience),
imagine how nice it would be if you could just push the cracked bumper back
into place, and it would perfectly heal by itself.
Dynamic materials could change from stiff to soft depending on how much
stress they are subjected to. Just like ground coffee will be hard as a brick
when it is vacuum-packed, yet low like a luid when the vacuum is released,
so-called jamming materials could be printed to change their stiffness in
response to their environment.
The effect of patterning on material properties is far from intuitive.
Material scientists and engineers spend careers trying to predict properties
of even relatively simple composite materials like carbon iber laminates. The
advent of high-resolution multimaterial printers will open up such a vast new
design space that it is dificult to anticipate the properties of the materials
that will be possible, let alone exploit them for design. As the capabilities
of 3D printers to deposit multimaterials expand, people will discover new
materials sometimes by accident and sometimes by careful research. Just as
new CAD tools are needed to help designers explore new shapes using new
languages and design concepts, new design tools are needed to explore the
new range of materials.
Moving from printing passive parts to
active systems
So far this chapter has discussed printing passive materials—hard or soft,
elastic or stiff. Passive materials respond to their environments in a predict-
able mechanical way. In the future we will print active materials that act and
react, sense, compute, and respond to their environment. The quest for print-
ing active materials has had lots of its and starts, as a result, the vast majority
of whiz-bang 3D prints today are still of the passive sort—small and large,
simple and complicated—but always passive parts.
The lowest hanging fruit in the area of active material printing is printing
conductive materials—materials that conduct electricity. We already know
how to print metals, and metals are good conductors, so what's the problem?
The challenge is to print electrically conductive materials embedded inside
