The processing, characterization and property measurement of the self-organized or self-assembled nanostrutures are a very active, broad and rapidly expanding research area for chemists, physicists, and materials scientists. Due to the multi-disciplinary and cross-fields of this new area, the definition of self-assembling process may be different among people from different fields. Generally speaking, self-assembling process is a method that organizes materials (molecules, nanocrystals, etc.) through non-covalent interactions such as hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces, electrostatic forces, etc. By choosing suitable chemical conditions, ordered nanostructured materials can be processed by a simple self-assembling process, that is, this structure can be formed by themselves without external intervention. However, optimization of the materials chemistry for self-assembly is not so easy as it appears. In fact, only very recently, a great deal of breakthrough in this field has reignited people's interest in it.

Broadly speaking, there are several different kinds of self-assembled structures: ordered self-assembled nanocrystals, ordered mesoporous nanostructured materials, and hierarchically ordered materials. Hierarchically structured materials are materials that have ordering on different length scales. In the following sections, the current status of research on different kinds of nanostructured materials is reviewed, and their future prospects are discussed.