Perhaps the most promising and intriguing examples of ‘deformation engineering’ of materials behaviour, however, can be found in microstructured systems in which the bulk material is constituted from many small components: beads, droplets, rods, sheets and filamentary networks. Here, considerably different bulk properties can be elicited, often reversibly, by deformation-induced changes to the shapes or arrangements of the parts. In such cases, the material becomes a metamaterial, the properties being determined not just by the fabric from which it is made but from the internal geometry of the components. Because the behaviour may depend on such factors as the shapes of the constituent particles, their movement and mutual friction, and their geometric configuration, the deformation engineering of materials intersects with other burgeoning fields such as granular materials, active matter and liquid crystals.

然而，也许材料行为的“变形工程”最有前途和最有趣的例子可以在微结构系统中找到，其中大块材料由许多小组件构成：珠子、液滴、棒、片和丝状网络。在这里，通过变形引起的零件形状或排列的变化，通常可以可逆地引发相当不同的体积特性。在这种情况下，材料变成了超材料，其特性不仅取决于制造它的织物，还取决于组件的内部几何形状。因为行为可能取决于组成粒子的形状、它们的运动和相互摩擦以及它们的几何配置等因素，