Cian O'Luanaigh, online producer
The origami workshop at the London Knowledge Lab yesterday started quite literally with a bang.
Mark Bolitho, the enthusiastic secretary of the British Origami Society, deftly folded a single sheet of coloured paper into a compact triangular dart, and with a flick of the wrist it exploded through the air with a noise like a popping balloon.
My effort, in contrast, gave a crumpled squeak. I quickly learned I am quite rubbish at folding paper along a straight line - a key skill in origami, it turns out.
The session was led by Bolitho, who worked as a chartered accountant for 10 years before turning to origami full time, and now does trade shows and commissions for advertisers. His engaging and often humorous presentations on the history and applications of origami were interspersed with mathematical insights and paper-folding fun.
He demonstrated folds step by step with oversized sheets of paper - creating large paper animals and spaceships. Fellow enthusiasts at my table followed with ease, but I was always at least four steps behind - and the source of much hilarity. Luckily, help was at hand in the form of origami society treasurer Sue Pope, who patiently turned my amateur wrinkles into elegantly angled creases, rumpled rags into pleasingly delicate constructions.
But there's more to origami than just folding paper into pretty shapes, Bolitho stressed. "There is a developing internal mathematics within origami which is very complicated", he said. "Within a square of paper I can fold certain shapes, but there are some ways which are more efficient than others."
There are several ways of folding a cube out of a piece of paper, for example, but one will waste the least paper, yielding a larger cube. "That's the creative challenge," said Bolitho. "What is the most efficient shape? What is the best use of paper?" He cited an origami lion he made years ago which pleased him because he got the most lion possible out of a single sheet.
Bolitho's designs are based on experience, and he admits he isn't a mathematician. But he capably introduced us to mathematical side of origami with geometric shapes, the modular paper strip constructions of Heinz Strobl, tessellating patterns and 3D polyhedra.
He also mentioned useful tools for people interested in the mathematics of origami, such as the Haga theorems for dividing a square. He also cited the work of Robert Lang, who designed folding telescopes for NASA before writing the computer program TreeMaker, which calculates the optimal "net" - or series of fold lines - to make any origami shape, from paper planes to scorpions.
I was impressed to learn about the range of styles and applications origami has to offer. At my table, dress designer Indu was reminded of the work of the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, whose flat-packed tessellating dresses unfold into wearable 3D shapes, for example, and Bolitho also pointed out that the medical stents for supporting arteries work on origami principles - they go in compact and are mechanically pulled to expand into a new shape. "That's a foldable structure," he says. "We could make that out of paper." The pleated patterns of folded paper also inform architectural structures: the Yokohama international cruise terminal in Japan is an iconic example.
As the presentations ended I continued to struggle over a Japanese crane (it ended up with a broken back and a beak like a screwdriver). Looking up, I realised that to my left, Weiwan, a mathematics teacher from Taiwan, had already conjured up two frogs in different sizes which could actually hop.
I shall be practising hard.