The living cell represents a magnificent example of responsive, smart, and programmable matter, combining the ability to sense changes in its environment with the means to adapt in a quick and effective manner. We seek to study and ultimately harness the physical principles underlying this responsive behavior to design and control novel bio-inspired and smart materials. We are mainly interested in systems that exploit properties of both glassy and active matter, such as active disordered (bio-)networks, actively doped glasses, and vitrimers—a new class of responsive polymers.