الفهرس 
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Abstract
This research transverses across the threshold of architecture into the realm of interdisciplinary integration between material science, design and architecture. This thesis investigates the Soft autonomous alternative for mechanical systems to achieve responsive kinetic architecture; performative materials. Conventionally, up till now such genre of architecture is restricted to massive mechanical systems where their functional and visual impact is rather debatable due to their myriad complex contrivances and immense energy consumption. In fact, the behaviour of the mechanical joint is emulated by the material’s molecular structure and its intrinsic attributes enabling it to alter its shape and exhibit dynamic immanent behavioural transformations induced by external stimuli. The primal purpose behind this academic enterprise is to create a design framework which can be adopted by designers and architects to design and develop a shape changing material system within architectural applications. Accordingly, this was achieved by creating a multi-tiered hybrid design framework (MDF-RMA); an offspring of amalgamating both, the conventional methodological design framework and the responsive materials’ aspects. Due to its highly interdisciplinary nature, to define the RMA, various features were conjugated from distinct scopes such as kinetic architecture, materials’ attributes and their behavioural capacities. The hybrid methodology functions on multi-tiered levels; Schematic, Generic and Comprehensive through which the degree of sophistication and detailing in RMA is escalating. In order to delve deeper into defining such integration and to verify the propounded design framework, an experimental phase was conducted with the guidance of several material scientists. The design framework was applied starting with designing several shape changing shading systems and ending with practically experimenting them with samples of a shape changing smart material, shape memory polymer (SMP). In fact, such laboratory experimentations helped in setting a clearer and more defined design framework where each design phase (MDF) is comprehensively re-explained and joined with the corresponding material aspect (RMA) to consider during each phase. The prime finding of this diverse and wide-ranging study is that the proposed framework is not meant to be strictly followed but rather to be flexibly adopted as a guiding schema. Collaboration with material physicists, scientists and software developers is inevitable in order to simulate and anticipate the behavioural characteristics and capacities. Nevertheless, the performance of the shape changing material systems (SCMS) is affected by a myriad of factors. Hence, the amount of experiments and investigations that should be conducted to create a SCMS that functions in a real scale is immense; further examinations are essential. Taken together, this research has set a point of departure into the realm of designing SCMS within architectural applications which is concluded to be a propitious platform where novel directions in the material landscape is foreseen.