Origami & Folding
what one sheet can do
Concept

Thickness accommodation — where it appears

Any technique for making a rigid folding work in a material with depth. Each of them sacrifices something — travel, kinematics, area or symmetry — and choosing between them is choosing which sacrifice.

Named by 7 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

zero thicknesspanels meet exactly4 layers of real materialeach fold has to clear the ones belowhinge offset to the surfacethe panel rotates about the right linea crease pattern describes a surface with no thicknessand everything anybody builds has some

The sheet has a thickness

Every crease pattern describes a surface with no thickness. Everything anybody builds has some, and getting it around a corner is the central problem of turning origami into hardware.

rigid · Thickness 0°61°108°travel before contact110.0°measured by contact testpanel thickness22% of the panel lengthwhat it gives upmaterial at the crease, sothe panel is thinnest whereit is worked hardesta zero-thickness pattern says the panels meet along a line; nothing that is built does

Getting thickness round a corner

There are half a dozen ways to build a fold in a panel that has depth, and the useful way to arrange them is not by what the cross-section looks like. It is by what each one gives away.

rigid · Thickness grown symmetricallyoffset to one sidepanels overlap over 4% of their areawhich is the jam every thick-panel design meetspanels do not overlap at alland the hinge axes have not movedwhich is not free: fold it tighter and this offset runs out toosheet 0.16 panel-lengths thick, folded to 100° — the overlap is measured from the geometry

Panels with somewhere to go

Every way of giving a folded panel real thickness costs something. Tachi's offset-panel technique costs the least interesting thing there is — it stops the panels being a surface, and leaves the hinges exactly where the zero-thickness pattern put them.

rigid · Thickness 0°40°71°travel before contact72.1°measured by contact testpanel thickness22% of the panel lengthwhat it gives upa gap, and with itstiffness and a pattern nolonger quite the one onpapera zero-thickness pattern says the panels meet along a line; nothing that is built does

Nowhere to put the error

Paper takes a misplaced crease and spreads it along its whole length as a curvature nobody notices. A panel is flat by definition and cannot, so the error arrives at the hinge — and the room to receive it is a length that has to be drawn, is paid for in fold angle, and has to grow with the crease count.

rigid · Tolerance 0°61°108°travel before contact110.0°measured by contact testpanel thickness22% of the panel lengthwhat it gives upmaterial at the crease, sothe panel is thinnest whereit is worked hardesta zero-thickness pattern says the panels meet along a line; nothing that is built does

Thickness round a closed loop

Real panels have thickness, and every technique for accommodating it works by shifting a hinge off the ideal crease by a small amount. On a flat sheet the shifts accumulate outward and end at the edge. On a closed sheet they accumulate round a loop and have to come back to where they started, which is a condition none of the techniques was designed to satisfy.

rigid · Thickness the bar is the share of the footprint at least half as deep as its deepest pilethe note is how deep that pile is and how much of the footprint it coversThe preliminary base100.0%uniform · deepest 8 layers over 99.7%The Yoshimura pattern100.0%uniform · deepest 60 layers over 100.0%The waterbomb tessellation96.6%uniform · deepest 32 layers over 96.6%The tapered corrugation87.9%graded · deepest 16 layers over 0.9%The Miura fold75.5%graded · deepest 16 layers over 11.9%The hexagon twist24.5%island · deepest 7 layers over 24.5%The square twist17.5%island · deepest 9 layers over 17.4%Fold and cut — the triangle3.0%island · deepest 7 layers over 2.9%uniform: the pile is the pattern · island: the deep region is a patch · graded: deepest on a sliver, half as deep nearly everywhere

Three kinds of pile

A thick-panel technique is priced at the deepest pile a pattern has, and the depth of that pile says nothing about where it is. Mapped over the folded footprint, the printed patterns fall into three kinds. On a uniform pile the deepest count is the whole footprint — sixty layers everywhere on the Yoshimura. On an island it is a patch and the rest is shallow. On a graded pile it is a sliver — under one per cent of the tapered corrugation — while nearly nine tenths is at least half as deep, and the Miura, the pattern that gets built, is graded.

rigid · Thickness the bar is the share of the paper in panels that lie over more than one deptheach panel's folded image is laid on the depth map and the depths under it are countedThe preliminary base0.0%uniform · 8 panels · 1 depth under eachThe Yoshimura pattern0.0%uniform · 65 panels · 1 depth under eachThe waterbomb tessellation0.0%uniform · 52 panels · 1 depth under eachFold and cut — the triangle90.0%island · 7 panels · 1 to 3 depths under eachThe hexagon twist92.5%island · 13 panels · 1 to 4 depths under eachThe square twist94.2%island · 9 panels · 1 to 4 depths under eachThe Miura fold100.0%graded · 24 panels · 3 to 4 depths under eachThe tapered corrugation100.0%graded · 28 panels · 4 depths under eacha panel over one depth can be given one thickness; a panel over several cannot

A panel is not the unit of depth

A thick-panel design gives each panel a thickness, an offset or a taper, so a graded pile could be met panel by panel only if every panel's folded image lay over one depth. On the Miura none does. Every one of its twenty-four panels lies over three or four of the four depths its pile takes, and on the tapered corrugation every panel lies over all four. The uniform piles are the opposite — every panel of the Yoshimura, the waterbomb and the preliminary base lies over exactly one depth — which is why panel-by-panel techniques look adequate on the patterns they are drawn for. On the Miura the steps between depths cross the middle of panels, and they run parallel to the panels' own sides.

rigid · Thickness

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

The offset-panel techniqueTapered panelThicknessLayer countManufacturingMembrane hingeHinge axisStackingBoundaryClearanceGluingHinge

All concepts