Designer and architect Skylar Tibbits was constructing a massive museum installation with thousands of pieces when he had an epiphany. “Imagine yourself facing months on end assembling this thing, thinking there’s got to be a better way,” he says. “With all this information that was used to design the structure and communicate with fabrication machines, there’s got to be a way these parts can build themselves.” And there is.

This idea propelled Tibbits to enroll at MIT for dual master’s degrees in computer science, and design and computation—in pursuit of the idea “that you could program everything from bits, to atoms, and even large-scale structures,” Tibbits says.

 …