Tag: Origami

Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, has been around for centuries. I’ve always found it pretty cool, considering how you can turn a sheet of paper into absolutely anything you want to with a few folds and tucks here and there. 

Taking your medicine with a spoonful of sugar might not be the best thing to do, especially if you’re a diabetic. But something that can definitely help the meds go down is Singapore design student Chan Min Yun’s Bloom.

Scientists from Harvard University have been able to coax DNA into assembling themselves into numbers, letters, symbols, Chinese characters, and even emoticons such as the ubiquitous smiley. These tiny strands of DNA measure billionths of a meter long and represent the next stage in “DNA origami.”

This watch has a distinctive face, that looks like it was folded by an expert at origami. British designer Benjamin Hubert created this for Italian accessory maker Nava. The Plicate watch has its increments integrated as three dimensional surfaces, which definitely gives it a cool look.

As my sister has told me, it’s sometimes a pain to travel when you’ve got babies because of the strollers. It takes a while to fold the entire thing and set it up, it takes a bit longer to make your baby leave your arms and sit in it (if you’ve got a particularly needy baby, then, well, it will take much longer), and another while to fold the entire thing back up again for storage.

I’ve always been amazed by the mind-bending illusions of artist M.C. Escher. His perplexing worlds definitely had more than a little bit to do with the thematic concepts and set designs in the equally awesome Inception.

I am not artsy at all. I can’t draw, I can’t paint, and I am not the sort to make crafts. About as artsy as I get is building something out of LEGO on occasion or making the occasional scale model with my kids.

One of Elecom’s latest wireless mice, the look of the Orime is supposed to be a reference to the ancient Japanese art of origami. Either that or first generation PlayStation games. Whatever the inspiration, I wonder if anyone bothered to test the usability of this device.

This laminated origami sculpture of the late great Grand Master was masterfully created by Etsy seller and papercraft Jedi catamation. It’s about 3.5″ tall, or about one-tenth of Yoda, if the Star Wars Wikia is to be believed.

Brian Chan has made a few impressive origami, including an Iron Man mask and a sort of Iron Man action figure that’s completely made out of paper. Brian is an MIT staffer, but after having a look at the plans he’s got on his website, it makes me wonder if you need a degree from MIT to be able to duplicate these.

Designer Chengyuan Wei took apart a telephone handset and discovered that the important bits only took up a small space of the interior. So she thought of designing a handset that was materially efficient and lightweight, and this is what she came up with.

A team of scientists at MIT Cambridge have developed a prototype of a “programmable matter” which can automatically change its shape when electrical impulses are applied to it. A demonstration of the technology was put together using a sheet of the material, which automatically folds itself into various shapes.

This new mp3 player concept lets you play with its shape in order to come up with the icons that you need in order to control your music. It’s called the Play Mp3 Player. So basically, you have to fold the player in half, thus forming the icon ” ▶” in order to play your music.

These gigantic origami tigers signal the beginning of another Year of the Tiger, which will be shortly coming up after Chinese New Year on February 14th. These origami tigers were designed by the Australian firm LAVA and they were made to raise the awareness of tigers as an endangered species.

Have some old concert or train tickets lying around? With a little folding, some X-Acto knife skill and a whole lot of patience, you can turn those old tix into some tiny little X-Wing Fighters. Paper-master Hubert de Lartigue shows you how-to do it with a Paris METRO ticket here.

When I think of Origami, I usually think of little paper swans, or maybe the unicorn that Edward James Olmos made in Blade Runner. But who says that video games can’t get in on the paper foldin’ action?