In the age of digital design, designers are destined to face the process of rationalizing the form after a lengthy foreplay of form making in order to fabricate it into an actual product. Ironically, some designers/architects these days fully exploit the capability of freeform design to irrational extreme and put another effort and cost in rationalizing the form therewith. Many of these rationalization processes deal with panelizing the freeform surface such as approximating designed surfaces to developable surfaces, or even more brutally, irregular triangulation.
A4 Chair is designed with the reversed concept – origami approach. A single strip of surface is folded into shape a chair in consideration of utilizing bendable materials like bentwood or plexiglass. This does not only ensures developability of the final form (into a single piece of surface material!) but also renders fluidity of final form.
Sketch a chair
Final Sketch – A whole sheet of A4 paper is folded into a chair
Digitized Sketch
A Grasshopper sketch is created to digitize the hand sketch. This Grasshopper sketch makes it possible to visualize folded form real time and ensure that the model (folded and unfolded) is actually within desired constraint.
With this custom vb.net component, form making process boils down to adjusting end points of fold lines along 1 dimensional axis and corresponding folding angles.
Grasshopper Sketch for fold sketching
Final Form
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