Material Programming

In the near future every other smart material will have computational power embedded in the form of graphene transistors or nanotubes. These will be the ultimate computational composites: materials that hold classic material qualities, such as structural durability, flexibility, texture, weight, and color, but additionally being capable of sensing, actuating, and computing. Indeed, computers will not be things in and by themselves, but embedded into the materials that make up our surroundings. This also means that the way we interact with computers and the way we program them, will change. Consequently we ask what the practice of programming and giving form to such materials would be like? How would we be able to familiarize ourselves with the dynamics of these materials and their different combinations of cause and effect? Which tools would we need and what would they look like? Will we program these computational composites through external computers and then transfer the code them, or will the programming happen closer to the materials? In this feature we outline a new research program that floats between imagined futures and the development of a material programming practice.