Smart materials

Smart materials are designed materials that have one or more properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by external stimuli, such as stress, temperature, moisture, pH, electric or magnetic fields.

Other keywords related to smart material are such as shape memory material (SMM) and shape memory technology (SMT).

There are a number of types of smart material, some of which are already common. Some examples are as following:

Smart materials have properties that react to changes in their environment. This means that one of their properties can be changed by an external condition, such as temperature, light, pressure or electricity. This change is reversible and can be repeated many times. There are a wide range of different smart materials. Each offer different properties that can be changed. Some materials are very good indeed and cover a huge range of the scales.

...
Wikipedia