That mindset was important to Emeco, a US-based furniture company established in the 1940s. When they were struggling to make the foam in their upholstery more sustainable, Tibbits’s team was “really good at taking a step back and saying, ‘Okay, well, what if it didn’t have to be that way?’” says Jaye Buchbinder, a product development engineer at the company. “In our heads, it’s ‘Let’s find a better foam,’ and in their heads, it’s ‘How do you not use foam?’” Buchbinder also worked with Tibbits to run a course at MIT about reimagining a chair for the future—one that could be reconfigured or infinitely recycled.
Lately, Tibbits has turned his attention to textiles—in particular, using fibers and yarns to create active structures that can sense and transform. For example, climate-adaptive clothing can open and close its “pores” in response to heat in order to regulate the wearer’s temperature. Or extreme heat can be harnessed selectively to custom-tailor a generic article of clothing. The lab, in collaboration with the fashion brand Ministry of Supply, recently showcased a knitted dress prototype that can be sized and styled in the store to fit a customer’s needs. A robotic arm applies heat to specific parts of the dress, shortening fibers and changing the garment’s shape.
In all cases, the magic lies in the process. “There’s nothing magic about the material,” says Tibbits. “Every material is active.” In fact, that property is usually considered a nuisance: think warping wood. But, he says, “if you can help guide it to do some kind of useful transformation, then that’s great.”
If it all sounds a little whimsical, it is. Tibbits sees the importance of creating something practical—the textiles are exciting to him because they can be made on preexisting factory machines, which makes them possible to scale—but he likes it when the result is also radical. One of his most out-there projects is happening on the other side of the world in the Maldives, where the team has worked in collaboration with a company called Invena on underwater structures designed to influence wave energy and promote sand accumulation in certain spots along island shores—an alternative to dredging. The idea is to harness natural forces, rather than fight them, to help protect coasts against erosion and rising sea levels.
The way Tibbits sees it, his position in academia allows his lab to “fail often and, frankly, waste time and money”—resources that most companies could not afford to waste. He sees it as his obligation as a designer to spend time considering the radical and irrelevant.
“Sometimes they’re playful, sometimes they’re weird, sometimes they’re funny,” he says of his designs. “Hopefully, eventually, they’re useful, they’re helpful, they’re important.”
Anna Gibbs is a freelance science journalist based in New York City.
