THE SELF-ASSEMBLY LAB was located in MIT's International Design Center, a cross-disciplinary design research center that was run by Björn Sparrman, Schendy Kernizan, Jared Laucks, and Skylar Tibbits in 2018. The lab has since moved to MIT's Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), a major interdisciplinary center that will build on the Institute’s leadership in design-focused education and become a global hub for design research, thinking, and entrepreneurship.

“Self-assembly” is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through only local interaction. In self-assembling systems, individual parts move towards a final state, whereas in self-organizing systems, components move between multiple states, oscillate, and may never come to rest in a final configuration.

(Source: MIT Self-Assembly Lab)