{"id":2828,"date":"2014-11-10T00:29:15","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T05:29:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zingman.com\/blog\/?p=2828"},"modified":"2014-11-10T00:29:15","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T05:29:15","slug":"origamit-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/10\/origamit-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"OrigaMIT IV"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just got back from what\u2019s becoming an annual autumn tradition: the MIT Origami conference, a.k.a OrigaMIT. First off, it\u2019s a great time of year for a drive up to New England, with the leaves turning red and gold contrasted against all kinds of vivid, changing blue and grey skies.<\/p>\n

This year was the best one yet. Thanks to Jason Ku and the MIT Origami Club for putting it all together. It\u2019s grown to over 200 attendees, but still feels cozy and intimate. I saw a bunch of origami friends, although I didn\u2019t have the chance to do more than say hi more than I would have liked. I exhibited a few \u201cgreatest hits\u201d animals from my book, the one-sheet polyhedra from Uyen\u2019s exhibit this summer, and a couple new models including my Single-Sheet Dual Interlocking Cubes with Color Change, and a new butterfly currently known as Butterfly III.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t normally go to many classes at conventions, preferring mainly to teach and hang out, but this year I went to three. The first was Joseph Wu\u2019s faces. Joseph is a great guy, creative, friendly and articulate, and I haven\u2019t seen him in a few years because he\u2019s on the west coast. Rather than teach a finished model, he taught his \u201cface base\u201d and then had the class freestyle to finish the model each in his own way, making creative discoveries along the way. His base focused on the nose and mouth, but the eye treatment was incomplete, so I began focusing on that. It was fun and interesting. I\u2019ve had the idea to experiment with faces for a long time, but didn\u2019t really have a good way in to get started. Seemed like a pretty big break from the other stuff I\u2019m doing. Now I hope I can make the time to continue these explorations and develop something cool.<\/p>\n

The second class I took was Paul Jackson\u2019s one-fold origami. I\u2019d never met Paul before, although I\u2019ve been a big fan of his work and his style. Apparently he was in town for some other reason and it just happened to be the weekend of OrigaMIT. Paul comes from a design background, and the class was about minimalism (as you might expect), and using light and shadow, curved surface, and texture as design elements in origami, and examining closely what\u2019s really going on with the paper, and developing an appreciation of these elements and a vocabulary for how to use them. From single-fold he went to partial-fold and finally to no-fold models. Like Joseph he railed against the tyranny of \u201cthe model\u201d as the organizing principle and advocated for process, discovery, creative spontaneity, and exploring variations on a theme. As one data point for how far origami has come, back when I was in design school I did a few things that would now be classified as modular origami and tessellation origami, and at the time no one really got it. I thought it\u2019d be funny to ask Paul if he had diagrams for any of his one-sheet models, but was able to restrain myself.<\/p>\n

After lunch it was Erik Demaine\u2019s lecture. He\u2019s deep into reverse-engineering the life work of David Huffman, and inventing and proving all sorts of theorems about curved folding along the way. Neat stuff.<\/p>\n

It was a lovely day and it\u2019s always a treat for me to visit Boston, so I took a break in the middle of the day to go for a walk along the Charles river.<\/p>\n

I spent the second half of the day teaching. First I class I taught was my Butterfly III. This is actually a set or series of models. It\u2019s easy and natural for me when I\u2019m designing for my thought process to run in streaks. After Joseph and Paul\u2019s classes I decided that was a good theme for the day, and tried to bring that across in my class. The first variation of butterfly is low-intermediate. It\u2019d be dead simple if not for a compound swivel fold to form the wings, but as it is it can be folding in five minutes. The interesting thing about the simple form is that begins folding the paper in half to form a rectangle. From there on it\u2019s two layers thick and might as well be folded from half a sheet. But if you pull apart the layers at step 4 you get a whole nuther flap of paper that can be use to form the legs and antenna.<\/p>\n

I also invented a bird using the same approach, but making the first fold on the diagonal rather than straight across. Using the same trick I can make it either with or without talons. I\u2019ve been toying around with developing a two-headed eagle, and this looks promising as a base, although adding a second head changes the layout pretty radically.<\/p>\n

My second class was my Mandela Tessellations. Strictly speaking these aren\u2019t even really tessellations because they use polar rather than Cartesian coordinate geometry and they don\u2019t tile a plane, just the area around a single point. Of course they could be extended to fill a plane, but that\u2019s not the point of why I\u2019m doing them. And again, keeping with the them of variation, I\u2019ve developed two types, one with 8-fold symmetry (the Qadrose) and one with tenfold (the Penflower). I diagrammed both of these for the OrigaMIT convention collection. It was good to teach from diagrams, especially since the model has a lot of heavy prefolding. I spotted some places where the diagrams could be improved for clarity, and it\u2019s always good to learn something when you teach a class. For the final, 3-D part I might add some detailed instructions to show more in-between steps, or maybe I\u2019ll drop in some photos there when it\u2019s time to publish it in a book. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the diagrams attached, and any feedback you have is always appreciated.<\/p>\n

The evening was hanging out with origami friends. Brian Chan invited Jeannie and myself, along with a few other people, for a tour of MIT\u2019s Hobby Shop, where he works. It\u2019s a rather advanced machine shop full of CNC routers and water cutters and other fun stuff. Brian is building a fully functional Iron Man suit in his spare time there. He has a 3-D printer which he\u2019s using to make parts for a new 3-D printer made as much as possible from 3-D printed parts. I guess there\u2019ll come a day when he can press a button and start the singularity. Get ready!<\/p>\n

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I just got back from what\u2019s becoming an annual autumn tradition: the MIT Origami conference, a.k.a OrigaMIT. First off, it\u2019s a great time of year for a drive up to New England, with the leaves turning red and gold contrasted against all kinds of vivid, changing blue and grey skies. This year was the best … Continue reading “OrigaMIT IV”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-origami"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}