When many interacting degrees of freedom come together, qualitatively new phenomena and organizing principles emerge that have no analogue in few-particle systems. In this talk I will describe how this "more is different" paradigm in a sense applies also at the macroscale. Indeed, in recent years condensed matter physicists have developed methods of combining ordinary, large-scale materials to design exotic states of matter that are either difficult or impossible to realize by relying solely on a system's intrinsic dynamics. As a particularly exciting illustration, I will focus on means of engineering phases that support "non-Abelian anyons": emergent particles that carry the most exotic form of exchange statistics that nature in principle permits. Such particles are interesting in their own right, and may also prove key to overcoming one of the grand challenges in the field—the synthesis of a scalable quantum computer.
