Reinventing the zipper

With an adaptable fastener designed at CSAIL, pitching a tent or adjusting the cast for a broken bone could be almost as easy as zipping your coat. The researchers, led by associate professor Stefanie Mueller, were inspired by an abandoned prototype for a three-sided zipper that William Freeman, PhD ’92 (now an MIT professor), patented in the mid-1980s. With software they created, people can design customized versions of this fastener to be 3D-printed in plastic.