Know when to fold them: the tech inspired by origami

Screams filled the laboratory – screams, thankfully, of joy. Akib Zaman, a PhD candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had just made a mini chair appear, seemingly out of nowhere.

He had pulled a thread attached to a flat, rectangular piece of waffle-like material segregated into dozens of wonky-looking square tiles. With that careful pull, the slab compressed together, suddenly stood up, and took on the shape of a tiny, curvy, modernist-style chair.

After months of work, it was the first time he and one of his fellow researchers had seen their idea come to life. "That was a great moment," recalls Zaman. "We were both excited – we screamed."

Zaman was inspired by the Japanese art form kirigami, like origami but instead of merely folding paper to achieve a 3D shape, kirigami also involves cutting.

It's often used to make paper pop-ups. Both origami and kirigami have influenced engineers for many years. These techniques can enable materials to behave in surprising ways – but finding useful applications for them has long been a challenge.

In Zaman's case, he and his colleagues found a way of 3D-printing material divided into chunky, square-shaped tiles. The angles of the sides of those tiles, and the precise nature of the cuts that separate them mean that, when squeezed together, they pop up into a desired 3D shape. It could be a chair, a tent-like structure, or a curved container of some kind, for instance.

The team made a computer program that converts a 3D model into the flat, grid-like version, to which a pull-cord is attached. The work was described in a paper published in December.

"You could make a larger structure like a building," says Zaman.

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