HTMAA 2024 - Week 14
Wildcard - Kirigami
HomeThis 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.
With the time I had I decided to just take one of their designs and try to recreate it.
I loaded up the image from the article into Illustrator and imaged traced it to get a vector.
I took the vector and gave it hairline strokes for laser cutting.
Then I took it to the laser cutter.
It came out pretty great, and I printed two layers to give it a bit more sturdiness.
Stacked.
At first I thought I could use tape to bring each piece together at its joints, like how the researchers used fabric strips to do so.
That idea failed due to the lack of surface area contacting the tape, so I assembled the pieces with hot glue.
Hot glue was compliant enough to allow the pieces to bend while still securing them together.
The assembly is able to transform into a circle!
And it is able to transform into a square!
Although it does take a little while...
That was this week of HTMAA! I didn't have any time in my week to sign up for the other wildcards and already covered origami and embroidery in past years so I hope this was a sufficient effort. In the future I'd like to develop my own custom bistable shapes that transform to each other, building on the efforts of the researchers in the article.
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