FabLab Week1 Modular Structure - Aurora & Maggie

This is our final work made by 42 pieces of brown paper. It looks like a flower from the top and looks like a pine tree upside down. Except for self-folding and directly inserting the pieces together, we also used paper clips (so there are actually three ways of assembly in this work). If you are interested in how we come up with this idea or the iteration process, please follow the table of contents below!

1. Sketching
2. Paper Prototyping
3. CAD Design & Joints for Assembly
4. Getting on the Laser Cutting Machine
5. Iteration & Final Product
6. Reflection

• 0.35 mm Brown Paper
• Several Paper Clips
• Softwares: Rhino 7, Adobe Ilustrator
• Laser Cutting Machine

Maggie: As shown by the left-sided picture, I combined two trapezoids together to make a butterfly-shaped plane. The line in the middle indicates where we fold to make it 3-dimensional. I also tried some lengthy shapes (the two on the right) in order to investigate how they would fold themselves together and them combined with each other.

Aurora: I tried some organic shapes like a shell-shaped design, and a long S-shaped design with holes on it (hopefully it can be twisted and the light will go through those holes). I'm not sure which design is more interesting, so we met in the lounge to talk about it.

We met together but still cannot figure out which design would work, so we took two scissors from the lab and cut out some paper to try physically.

1. The 2-trapezoid design works, but it looks too much like an architecture model and we don't think we can build a beautiful arrangement out of these pieces.

2. We also used staples to build a "flower". But again, it cannot be developed further with more pieces.

3. We tried the long-shaped designs, but it's not creative enough in our view.

4. We then furthered the shell-shaped design, by cutting out bigger pieces and smaller pieces and assembling them together. Although it is quite satisfactory, we are not happy about the assembly. It can not close up without the tape (since it doesn't have joints), and it is not 3-dimensional enough to be self standing. Also, we feel like we don't like the idea of using larger and smaller pieces, so we just decided to use a single piece for the assembly.

After all the experiments, we decided to revise the shell-shaped design directly on Rhino and use it for the real laser cutting step.

Aurora then worked on Rhino to make the 2D model. But we are a little bit concerned about the joints design, so we consulted Prof. García for that. The design on the bottom-left uses the assembly method of inserting paper together. However, it doesn't allow for inserting a piece of flipped around paper, which largely restricts the following assembly process. We also tried the tab insert, but it still has the problem previously stated. Therefore, we decided to make a 3mm circle on each side, so that we can use paper clips for the joints.

Below is our .dxf and .ai file. Feel free to download and make your own arrangement out of it!

We did some setup on Adobe Illustrator and worked on the laser cutting machine. We assembled 12 pieces and we are really happy about the results. The shell-shaped pieces are put together like a coral reef. The form is organic and artistic in some ways that it extends itself to different directions.

The "Coral Reef" looks good, but it is, as Prof. García indicated, "a little bit small because it is self-folding". So we resized our model in Rhino, and mass produced 48 pieces of them.

We tried an "open" assembly, but it's not layered enough and not so compact. Moreover, it looks good from the above, but not from the side view or other perspectives. Then we tried other ways to put them together. Finally, we came up with a structure with "petals" and "leaves" alternating.

Through this project, we learned the importance of prototyping. Maybe we have quite good pictures in our head of how would the 2D pieces be built together, but after all, they are only imagination. Due to physical restrictions or material restrictions, we are unable to build something exactly the same as our draft. But we are satisfied with how our project developed and iterated, to such an unexpected but nice output.