Origami workshop!!

First of all, class had not even started but I was already mesmerized by so many of the origamis that our guest lecture, David Kandel, pulled out of his boxes!!

I’ve always had interest in origami and paper folding since I was a kid, sounds like a stereotypical asian background but I was more into it because of pop-up books. Since paper was the most accessible material to get creative with when I was a kid, it is something that I tend to take for granted. I did my Hopkins Extreme Material Institute (HEMI) fellowship on paper structure this past summer, I wish I have had this crash course before I had that opportunity! Because! I learned so much about folding!!! and paper structure!!!! as paper engineers like to say, I got my hands dirty with math that day:

the first sample David gave us was the paper crane. He told the class to give it a try. I learned how to fold this when I was 5 so it’s something I always make whenever I have a scrap piece of paper like receipts and stuffs. I like to challenge myself to fold the tiniest paper cranes. It wasn’t my tiniest, but I folded a tiny paper crane and gave it to Annet. She looks great with it.

fun aside, it was interesting to learn how to fold this backwards. I learned how to fold these paper cranes in person from an old lady I met while visiting my dad at the hospital. Looking at the structure of the fold and how the valley and mountain folds create a flat material into a 3D object was pretty difficult to visualize. Then David showed us basics of folding patterns to make it easier to understand:

by looking at how different combinations and variations of valleys and mountains create different effect of pleats and dimensions give me more idea of how animal origamis are made.

I got to talk to David before class started because he told me about different amazing kinds of paper from all over the world and I showed him one of the paper making technique used in Japan called yosegi, wondering if he ever heard of it, he never heard of it and was excited to check it out. I’m definitely going to join his next workshop for advanced paper folding.

And for the second half we get to learn how to do those patterns we learned to fold by hand on grasshopper. The advantage? We can make patterns and change and shift the size by changing the input, and directly lasercut it onto our material.

so just like weaving on grasshopper, we started with making a grid

we cull the end of the list because we’re about to make zigzags here and we can’t use all points to make zigzags because it’s gonna go off the page! but it’s not offset yet, the zigzags won’t happen unless every other rows are offset to the opposite direction

and by using dispatch we could select the points in every other row, this way we can offset the points in every other row and connect the dots with polyline!

mmmyas. it doesn’t look quite like the pattern from the origami workshop yet though. but we can have zigzags that going to different directions by using different input of the dispatches (we’ll call the first one zig and the second one zag) from zig(a-0) zag(b-1) or switch it to zig(b-1) zag(a-0)

and if we duplicate those dispatches and make both combination at the same time

they’re all crossing one another! but if we use pick and choose we can get rid of what we don’t want

so there’s our pattern, we wanna make it pattern throughout the boundary so let’s use long list

and like our weaving grasshopper workshop, we want it to not only repeat the last polyline, but all. so right click on that and choose wrap instead of repeat last.

ayeyayayayeaye it’s the right folding pattern now!! time to make it presentable by choosing color and making the polylines appear dashed

Then Ryan taught us that we can lasercut things directly from grasshopper file without baking it to Rhino!! wowwie thanks Ryan for this dFab plugin!

(gotta make sure that the color are at RGB 0 or 255)

So I think I’m even more sure now that I’m getting the hang of grasshopper! I can’t wait for our next workshops. I would attach my grasshopper file for the workshop here but wordpress won’t let me. Oh and here are a couple of book recommendations from Annet and David that I might get or check out at library later.

 

The Fold: response

Everything in this world was created by patterns of multiple matters. Just like how we talked about weaving last week, pleats and folds have patterns as well. This reading confused me, so I thought that the easiest way to understand things is to actually do it on my own.

i looked sad in the last picture because i finished an origami and i still didn’t get it.

there was a part in the reading where it says “everything in the body works like a machine” and I had a lecture in my Biology in Pop Culture class, that that mindset is common amongst molecular scientists and they tend to be more religious. a couple paragraph after, it says “And when the hour comes for them to unfold their parts, to attain a degree or organic development proper to man, or to form cerebral folds, at the same time their animal soul becomes reasonable by gaining greater degree of unity (mind) …” it implies that a body is a folded machine that is ready to grow whenever the soul is blown into it and unfold each parts as it grows.

other thoughts I had while reading this material was the implication of different dimensions that was talked about in the beginning of chapter two. how there’s point, line, and plane, and those does not exist from our point of view because we live in a three dimensional world with time.

—> digital form is a fold of information in a form of codes, the binary system is the fold, the pleats, the crease, the minimize the fold.

this video helps me too

I’ll put more thoughts once I hear what other people think of it in class okay.