Kirigami (from the Japanese kiri meaning cut and kami meaning paper), the less popular cousin of origami, has been used for years to create art and even structures, such as castles. The art intrigued Professor L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), inspiring his lab to learn how artists control the location and number of cuts to create such complex shapes. Their research resulted in several studies over the last three years.
A Kirigami Haiku, by Prof. Mahadevan
Articulating
Paper cuts into art forms
Tells stories quietly
In the most recent study in Nature Computational Science, Mahadevan and his team asked what would happen if they played with the empty spaces between the kirigami tiles. They discovered they could play with the geometry of kirigami cuts to shape-shift from one shape into another. By focusing on the spaces between the kirigami patterns, they could achieve different designs. The team called this design the "hearty namaste", a transition from a heart-shape to a stylized variation of the namaste.
In a study published in Physical Review Research, the researchers asked can you convert a square into a circle? The team showed that kirigami could achieve the impossible using a simple deployable approach. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, the team asked if you could create art to tile a wall, or a deployable wall that can open and close. The study proved indeed you could, developing 17 deployable shapes made from tilings with repeated patterns. In a study published in Physical Reveiw Research, Mahadevan and his team asked if they could create these deployable art forms using tiles with nonrepeating patterns. The researchers created quasi-crystal kirigami inspired by the aperiodic tilings, which won a Nobel Prize decades ago. The kirigami quasi-crystal could open and close without repeating patterns.