Joseph Zhang – Looking Outwards – 11

For this Looking Outward, I really wanted to look at Amanda Ghassaei design work, specifically her 2017 Origami Simulator. A little about Amanda, she is a graduate of Pomona College and MIT’s media lab. Currently, she is working as a research engineer at Adobe’s Creative Intelligence Lab. With a background in physics and eventually design, she is applying her expertise in the fields of computational design, digital fabrication, and simulation methods

Origami Simulator is a WebGL app that mimics how a certain origami pattern creases and folds. What’s really interesting about this simulator is that contrary to the normal process of making one fold at a time, the simulator attempts to fold creases all at once.

Crease patterns are uploaded into the app as a SVG or FOLD format; from there, the app uses color and opacity to visualize the direction and fold angles of each crease.

The Origami Simulator app also connects to virtual reality and a user is able to interact with the digital forms through that as well.

Overall, I just really appreciate the way Amanda has brought both structure and delight to the seemingly ordinary concept of folding origami.