Origami, the Ancient Art Form Solving Modern Problems | Miles Wu | TED

I love origami. I love the way I can transform a simple piece of paper into almost anything -- like a wheel bug, my grandparents (Laughter) or even a neuron cell. I’m 14 years old. I live in New York City. And I’m in ninth grade -- so I'm usually busy with homework or after-school activities. But in my free time, I really enjoy doing origami. Origami is fun, but playing with paper has also shown me that origami has the power to stretch my creativity, help others and even lead to new discoveries. And today, I'd like to share one small discovery that I made and how I got there. So I started folding origami over seven years ago making ornaments for my family’s tiny Christmas tree and getting in trouble in class for turning my worksheets into ninja stars and paper claws. As you can imagine, my teachers were less than overjoyed, but I told them I was making academic weapons.

(Laughter) Over time, I began folding more complex origami and even designing my own models. But no matter what, I'm always folding. Give me any scrap of paper, and I'll challenge myself to turn it into something. For example, if I'm waiting in line at Trader Joe's, I might turn a sample cup into a crane or even a super-long CVS receipt -- (Laughter) into a centipede. Audience: Wow! Or even the New York Times into a lizard. And it’s this process of turning “nothing” into something that sparks my imagination and draws me to origami. I've also found that origami has the power to help others. During the pandemic, eight-year-old me wrote cards and mailed origami birds to seniors at my local nursing home to cheer them up during quarantine. And more recently, I've been folding even more origami birds. Two years ago, I folded some origami pigeons.

By some, I mean 200 of them. (Laughter) If you couldn't tell, pigeons are my favorite birds. And then the following year, I folded sparrows, another bird that’s overlooked but that I personally love. And I folded 100 of them and sold them alongside the pigeons to raise over $4,000 to donate to my local soup kitchen, as well as a nonprofit that rehabilitates injured and orphaned birds in New York City. (Applause) And so through this project, I was able to see the power of the most humble material, a simple piece of paper, to really help my community. More recently, I've been interested in the intersection of origami and science and engineering. I think it started in middle school when I began going down rabbit holes to see how scientists and researchers and engineers were using origami folds. For example, in space or even to help sick people. But one fold interested me in particular.

And this was the Miura-ori fold. It was invented in the 1970s by Koryo Miura, a Japanese astrophysicist. It’s a tessellation, which means it’s a repeating pattern of parallelograms. And the way these parallelograms are arranged, they're able to fold down to an extremely compact size in one smooth motion. This makes Miura-ori an efficient deployable structure. It’s even been used to fold a solar array that was sent into space. And last year, I was also reading the news about natural disasters like Hurricane Helene. And I saw so many people displaced. And it made me wonder if Miura-ori could be used to improve emergency deployable shelters by making them stronger and lighter. And so for my eighth-grade science fair project, I decided to study Miura-ori, and how I could optimize its strength-to-weight ratio. I started out by designing 18 different folding patterns. These had different heights, widths and angles of the parallelograms in the pattern. I tested each of these patterns across three different paper weights, and each of those variations twice, for a total of 108 Miura-ori that I folded and tested.

And for each of these Miura-ori, I wanted to see not only how much weight they could hold, but also how many times their own weight they could hold. And so for two months, I transformed my family's small New York City apartment into my testing lab with Miura-ori all over the place. When I was first starting out, I grabbed basically every heavy book and item, and I stacked them on top of the Miura-ori. But I quickly realized I didn't actually have enough weights to accurately test the models. And so I asked my parents to buy some really heavy exercise weights. 250 hours later -- and after a lot of heavy lifting -- I found that the Miura-ori with the smallest and least acutely-angled panels made out of the lightest paper had the greatest strength-to-weight ratio. The strongest pattern held almost 200 pounds, and another lighter version held more than 10,000 times its own weight. I found that the stronger patterns were more compact, and they also created truss-like structures that were able to distribute pressure evenly. It's amazing that something can be so strong and yet so lightweight at the same time.

And it's exciting to think about what potential applications a fold like this could have -- maybe even helping to imagine a better emergency shelter one day. And so this work that I did by myself at home led to me receiving the top prize at a national STEM competition last year. (Applause) As you can see, I was really shocked ... (Laughter) to receive such a big prize for simply playing with paper. And so in the future, I definitely want to keep exploring and learning. But most of all: to keep playing with origami so I can continue to discover all the possibilities a single piece of paper can hold. Thank you. (Cheers and applause)