MIT prototype keeps electrical connections through shape changes

At MIT, a chair can be imagined doing more than holding someone: it can convert into a storage table, flatten for stowing, and send its current shape to a display. The team behind that concept has built 3D-printed modular blocks called bifur-circuits that keep electrical conductivity as an object bends, twists or snaps into a new configuration.

The key is mechanical bifurcation, a sudden shift in structural behavior after a physical tipping point. Adding just one extra block creates numerous spatial combinations. Flexible conductive materials embedded at the pivot points connect neighboring blocks as they rotate, so each arrangement forms a distinct electrical circuit. The structure can therefore sense its own shape without external wiring or bulky mechanical sensors.

That intelligence is built into the hardware rather than added as a separate sensing layer. MIT’s researchers used a multimaterial 3D printer and custom computer-aided design simulation software to produce the blocks, addressing a practical problem: flexible conductors can break when repeatedly bent or compressed. The team reports more than 10,000 compression tests with no loss of electrical connectivity.

So what does that change in practice? A reconfigurable object could report its mode as it moves, making interactive furniture, rehabilitation tools and robotic grippers possible without a separate network of wires and mechanical sensors. MIT has already used the technology in interactive items including a game controller, while the researchers identify reconfigurable emergency shelters and shape-changing antennas as possible applications.

The evidence still describes a prototype, not a product in service. The durability result comes from the researchers’ own laboratory testing, and the sources do not give a price, production timetable or independent reproduction of the result. The next step is to show whether these building blocks can create structures that remain stable and can be actively moved, as lead author Marwa AlAlawi says the team hopes.