Hasta La Ideas

Images and review by Daniel Stillman

With 30 years of origami experience, one of my first concerns in reviewing Paul Jackson’s newest book Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form is the fact that origami is a 3D art. Translating 2D instructions into form is no trivial matter. Like Ikea instructions, origami diagrams are a language into themselves. This book is the distillation of years of teaching this material to design students. To get some practical benefit from it, I would suggest that you spend at least several hours, playing with the forms and techniques introduced here. As part of my review, I’ve asked my friend and leather jewelry designer Melissa Zook—someone with zero origami experience—to print out some templates, make some folds, and get inspired by the book.

Part One: Why it is Awesome

As soon as I saw this book cover, I was excited. Paul Jackson has been pushing the boundaries of origami for years. As a boy, I geeked out to many of his awesome models—his horse from an equilateral triangle first offended me for its lack of purity (origami was from squares!) but won me over for its elegance. His lidded box taught me how to divide a square into fifths using my eyes and an algorithm. Both were committed to memory at one point in my life. While I loved his representational designs, I was amused and bewildered by his more artistic endeavors that played with form and shadow, but had no legs. More and better representational origami was my main goal, and the goal of much of the origami world. Then I grew up, and so did origami.

Peter Engel’s book, Origami from Angelfish to Zen, was the first origami book that blew my mind. It showed me that origami was about form, topology, creativity, dreams and math. And nature is math. So I began to realize that my paper doodlings were pointing at something deeper—something about the real nature of the world. Engel got me reading the work of mathematical biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and thinking about my own origami designs. Creation was about algorithms, reflection, repetitions, alterations. Nature finds a good nugget of design and uses it over and over again, riffing on it like Jazz. We’re all made of cells. Origami is just made of triangles, really, and those triangles can multiply like bacteria across a sheet, creating new organisms as they multiply.

This book is a deep meditation on those cells and all the ways they can be combined and recombined to make forms.

Years ago, Jackson wrote an Encyclopedia of Origami and Papercraft Techniques which showed me the power and breadth of the medium of paper. This book is pushing way beyond that. Paper is just one type of sheet material. Anything thin—leather, metal, fabric—can be explored using these techniques. When you break the plane, you create dimension and form. And the study of form should be of interest to any designer. I think it should inspire the reader to take something good—a sketch, a form “module” if you will—and find out how far it can go, how else it can be applied and transformed.

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