I never thought I would be doing origami for an engineering course. Then again, MSE 493 (Smart Surfaces) is not a typical engineering course. The intense multidisciplinary projects are unlike anything I've encountered before, and with such a high concentration of talented individuals working in conjunction the bar has to be raised. At first it was slightly overwhelming, but after the initial shock wore off and we were able to think, regroup, and prepare my team came back with well thought out ideas and propositions. When we were first tasked with designing a smart surface that deals with folding and water on an hourly time scale I was stumped. How can water be folded? It's liquid, by nature it will fill whatever container you put it in. That's where the origami comes in - the art of folding paper (or acrylic, nylon, rubber, or any material) into shapes and figures can come in handy when designing a container to store water. Being the enginnerd I am I thought how best to tackle the problem; I used the most powerful tool I had at my disposal - google. A quick search returned these nifty inflatable boxes that start in 2D and can expand to hold sizable volume. Conveniently named origami water balloons, I had seen these in action before and set about the step by step example of making them:
My team liked the idea, it had come up in discussion previously but having that visual was key. When we all came back for our second meeting the discussion was flowing much better as everyone had plenty of ideas to add and discuss. We had an intense brainstorming session resulting in the whiteboard seen below:
With the wheels turning and everyone drawing similar conclusions as how to best tackle this problem we hashed some real tangible ideas and drawings out. I'm excited to share what we came up with and see the other teams progress on Tuesday!
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