> As I recall talking to Joseph Wu, following a diagram to fold origami is like
> painting by number. Doing origami however, is about putting a bit of
> yourself into the work. And I don’t think a machine can do that.
Totally!
It’s been an open question in generative, computational art for some time now.
Can a system make creative decisions? The current consensus (for sake of
simplicity of the argument) is that a good system can be a good design
“collaborator” but in the end humans are making the judgement. Although
evolutionary models are capable of making decisions based on criteria, humans
are still defining and coding the criteria.
Having done some work in fold automation and fabrication it’s an interesting
idea, but still kind of far-fetched that a machine could even come close to
human dexterity for origami. Sure, Devin Balkcom and some other teams have made
origami making robots, but they are *very* limited.
The real frontier is scale, below what a human could ever fold. The
self-folding Micro scale stuff is cutting edge, though mostly “kirigami” in
style.
We’ve got many years of reigning large over paper. We are “digital” origamists
after all. Pun intended :D
Best, Matthew
