Tiffany is a creative technologist from Taiwan with a background in architecture. Interested in the intersections between computational design, material programming, and robotic fabrication, her work focuses on creating digital-physical workflows that allow mass customization of material properties, behavior, and performance.

At the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) in Stuttgart, Germany, Tiffany researches and develops 4D-printing processes for programming materials to behave like plants, changing shape and stiffness in response to their surroundings without using any energy. She has previously worked in the United States and Taiwan, with professional experience ranging from designing transportation hubs and bike facilities to developing material-informed digital fabrication strategies for carbon-fiber systems.

Tiffany received her Master in Design Studies (MDes Technology) from Harvard University and her Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) from the University of Southern California.

Can engineered systems — like living organisms — passively adapt to their surroundings?
With the increasing demand for energy efficiency, building-scale structures that autonomously respond to their environment offer a sustainable solution to adaptive architecture.

This project presents a new generation of self-shaping, climate-responsive material systems constructed from a combination of tunable metamaterials and natural wood actuators.

These biocomposite structures are enabled by a large-scale, additive manufacturing robot platform, which integrates the pellet extrusion of tailored metamaterial structures with the pick-and-placement of wood actuators. In place of electro-mechanical control, movement is encoded in the physical materials and fabrication sequence.

This hybrid additive fabrication process allows the manufacturing of bio-inspired and self-shaping material systems to be upscaled in high volumes and with variable resolutions — resulting in meter-scale structures capable of transforming from flat to curved simply through changes in relative humidity and without consuming any energy.