Manuel DeLanda on Smart Materials

A guest on Lebbeus Woodss blog, Manuel DeLanda writes on Smart Materials. An exerpt below:

Ordinary load-bearing structures, such as those built of concrete and steel, would benefit enormously if they could actively damp dangerous vibrations or detect and stop fractures before they propagate. Self-monitoring and self-healing are adaptive capacities characteristic of many biological structures but conspicuously absent from those designed by humans. Research on smart materials is supposed to change this. But what makes a material “smart”?…

More here.