Inverse design: A new pathway to custom functional polymers

At a potluck, you ate the best chocolate chip cookie: golden brown, thick and chewy. Unfortunately, you don’t know who made the cookie the recipe came from, so you decide to recreate it. Using advanced design principles, you can randomly choose a recipe from dozens of options, bake, and observe the resulting cookies. If they are too thin, you can start again with a new recipe, add more flour, or let the dough chill longer and make a new batch. An alternative method is to start with the characteristics of the cookies you want and ask yourself: What recipe and baking settings will produce this type of cookie? This method is called inverse design.