This designer creates magic from everyday materials

Around 2012, at a bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Skylar Tibbits noticed someone wearing a shirt with the logo of a 3D-printing company. Tibbits, a designer and computer scientist, approached her and posed a question: “Why can’t I print something that walks off the machine?”

The idea kicked off a multiyear collaboration between the industrial 3D-printing company behind the logo, called Stratasys, and Tibbits’s Self-Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together...