The unifying scientific goal of the CCI, is to achieve a deeper understanding of the basic principles of emergence through complex interactions, and to harness complexity to develop predictive, controllable, and ultimately programmable approaches for creating materials and structures through emergent processes.
Across nature, from atomic to macroscopic scales, such emergent organization is ubiquitous, yet its governing principles remain only partially understood. In such processes, driven by nonlinear feedback and evolving far from equilibrium, the cumulative action of many individually simple steps produces outcomes that are qualitatively different from those of any single step.
The specific mechanism is secondary; what matters is the nature of the interaction and its evolution under repeated application. This is an inherently multiscale perspective, applicable from the atomic to macroscopic scales; it enables the creation of materials with adaptive, self-healing, and otherwise inaccessible functionalities. CCI is rooted in this basic-science perspective while pursuing pathways towards practical realization and technological impact.
