Collectively Intelligent Material Systems: Compositing Digital Systems Within Architectural Smart Material Applications

Developed through the field of material science in the late 90’s, ‘smart materials’ have been employed by the fields of science and engineering to miniaturize, expand and reflect a physical world saturated with information rich environments. However, these ‘smart-materials’ are infrequently employed by architects to address both technical, aesthetic and spatial architectural issues. This thesis aims to uncover this hesitation by design professionals, critiquing the reference of ‘smart’ and proposes a Collectively Intelligent Material system (CIM system). This design proposal sets forth a practical response to truly intelligent architecture through specific models of Collectively Intelligent Material (CIM) applications by producing ‘smart composite’ facade experimentations. The work seeks to combine the process of optical lithography and Arduino based digital processing to develop a CIM system. This can be employed by the architect over new or existing façades to facilitate intelligent building surfaces.