This week was our wildcard week, and I had many options for what I could do. At first, my interests aligned towards origami and embroidery, as I've done both before, but I realized I did not have enough time for either.
But I saw on the wildcard week a section for kirigami, which I had less experience in. I mean, I've done nice little pop up books but I never really got a chance to look into kirigami more.
This example from above from an Instructables page shows the kind of kirigami I was familiar with, which could've been easy to laser cut and use, but I figured that wasn't a cool enough project for this week..
But looking at the attached article, I found that the kirigami they were talking about would be insanely difficult for me to do.
Not all hope was lost, though! I saw an article below that piqued my interest and decided to check it out.
Reading through the article (https://news.mit.edu/2023/kirigami-inspired-formula-shape-shifting-materials-0601) I found something that would be cool enough to do but not too hard to do with my time constraints.
I found that a team was investigating how to transform a shape into another shape inspired by kirigami and origami. The concepts they were talking about reminded me of a lot of topics in math and engineering.
For one, it reminded me of the Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien theorem, which is where any 2D shape can be cut and reassembled into another via breaking it down into triangles.
It also reminded me of four bar linkages, which are found commonly throughout mechanical engineering./
And the transformation of the materials reminded me of compliant mechanisms, which are becoming more commonplace in design.
The actual process itself looked pretty difficult but they had an article published that went into how to make one.