Take a piece of paper and manipulate it in your hands.
Examine the crumpled pieces until patterns emerge.

With paper, you can only suggest things.
Paper tells you what it wants to do.

By behaving in a non-plastic way, it only allows certain
things to occur. When you try forcing paper to do what it
doesn’t want to, it creases and buckles, suggesting other
possible alternatives. By accepting or extending these
responses, a dialogue continues until a result is reached.

Trace the patterns that emerge with a pen or pencil
and replicate them on other pieces of paper.
Fold along these lines and refine the patterns.
Meditate on the possibilities of these patterns. Think
about ways in which they could combine alter or
replicate.

Try variations of pattern combinations.
Try to make sense of what is occurring. Examine stress distribution, mechanical action and tensions around the folds.

By expanding the result in replication, its individual mechanisms or stress relations combine to create broader behaviours across the entire sheet.

Formalise the results using more repetitions, executed precisely. Examine the way entire sheets behave as you manipulate them and apply pressure to various points.

The way in which these parts combine can significantly affect the nature of the entire piece. A range of possibilities may be produced from a single fold combined in different ways.

This experimentation can be used as a reference for design where the results are used as starting points for experimentation in analogous materials to create objects and structures. In this respect, this kind of experimentation may be as useful to architecture as
it is to textile design.

click to see the results...