Efforts are under way to manufacture electromechanical devices at ever smaller sizes. However, standard semiconductor technology places limits on how small such machines can be. In their Perspective, Bhattacharya and James explain how martensitic materials--which can distort reversibly without any diffusion taking place--may overcome this problem. Theoretical studies and preliminary experiments suggest that such materials can act as machines themselves, without the need for complicated construction of moving parts in the device.

We discuss methods of reversibly inducing non-developable surfaces from flat sheets of material at the micro-scale all the way to macroscopic objects. We analyse the elastic ground states of a nematic glass in the membrane approximation as a function of temperature for disclination defects of topological charge +1. An aim is to show that by writing an appropriate director field into such a solid, one could create a surface with Gaussian curvature, dynamically switchable from flat sheets while avoiding stretch energy. In addition to the prospect of programmable structures, such surfaces offer actuation via stretch in thin systems since when illumination is subsequently removed, unavoidable stretches return.