Context. Recent advances in additive manufacturing have enabled the rapid development of flexible mechanical metamaterials. Exotic properties, programmed on the scale of the unit cell, have been demonstrated in the linear regime, opening up potential applications in the fields of waveguides, energy absorbers and insulators. The exploration of nonlinear regimes have also begun, with a particular interest for structures composed of bistable unit cells [1]. A strong impact on such a system provokes the switching of the first cell via a snap-through instability, which triggers its neighbour and so on, such that this transition wave reconfigures the whole structure [2,3]. Objectives. The objective of this internship is to design architected structures capable of global or local reconfiguration. To this end, we will use strongly nonlinear waves propagating in carefully designed structures constituted of bistable buckled beams. The goal is to tailor the nonlinearities of the unit cell to allow the propagation of target nonlinear waves. In this context, the dynamical behaviour of the unit cell is crucial. An important part of the work will be devoted to the study of dynamical mechanical instabilities, with a particular interest for snap-through [5], to find new means of controlling the instability. The approach will mix experimental and theoretical work.