This is the first part and covers the first 3 pages of the document. I will be adding more and more until I complete the whole document.
Notes about birds design.
By Roman Días 10/2006
Design is without a doubt the most passionate thing about origami to me, my other favorite topic is interpretation, but I put it apart for now. I don't have the chance to talk about design very often. I have read some articles about the topic by Diego Quevedo in http://pajarita.org (traditional bases and packing), Albertino (Lionel) in http://passionorigami.com (designs starting with a base), Nick Bandoni in http://passionorigami.com (packing of circles and rivers), "Wolf" in Power Fold (very interesting), the "Origami Design Secrets" book by Robert J. Lang (the most complete about methods and techniques about design in origami existing up to now), and the ones I like the most: the article by Anibal Voyer (an interesting story about Meguro method, predecessor of Treemaker; and also mentions the legendary method of "imaginary unfold"), and the first part of Peter Engel's book "Folding The Universe". You can learn something from each of them, sometimesyou even learn what you are NOT supposed to do!!! But you can detect that none has the truth or the absolute and universal method, and that a good design is a combination of a "facing the problem method" added to some different origami design methods, applied to each author. From here, writing about design has 2 branches, the methodic numeration of techniques to make different things or the personal points of view that lots of times are not useful for anybody but the author. I think I am one of the second, so I will not describe a lot of systematic techniques. I am going to write about how I deal with design problems.
The Thousand Birds.
Lately I have designed different birds, so I will take birds as an example. When designing birds, you have to start from the same basic scheme. First, there can be swimming birds, walking birds or flying birds. Swimming birds swimming are not supposed to show legs or open wings. Walking birds won't have open wings, but must have legs. Flying birds must have open wings, but sometimes they show no legs. Starting with the most simple design, you can gradually make the bird more complex until you get to the "complete bird". As you can see, when you think about a design, numeration is sided with problems and not with solutions. This is a list of the possible problems we will find when we try to design a bird, depending on the elements we decide to add. In origami, we work with a unit (1 paper, 1x1 in size) so most of the things we do with a point of the paper will affect the rest of the sheet. Then, a global solution like Lang's Treemaker sounds reasonable. We can solve all of our problems in one step. Ah! If it could be that easy it wouldn't be that nice! Solving the length and distribution of the points we need will surely not result in the bird of our dreams. Elements like the "drawing" of the wings, the wide of the wings, the change of color in the chest or the elegance, don't have (for now, by luck) a mathematical solution.
Approach by problems.
Let's see the opposite approach. You can think that each part of the bird is an individual problem and we can look for a different solution for each. For example: solving the problem of the distribution and length of the points with a bird base, and the problem of adding fingers and open beak. Then, sub-problems will show up. Then, we will think about solving the number of fingers folding in 4 or 6 equal strips (for 3 or 4 fingers respectively) and the length of the fingers by "reasonable trial and error", testing with different widths and so on for each new challenge that shows up. And I don't want to lie: all along the process we will have the main problem which is how to make all the partial solutions to co-exist in a single model, not only without messing with each other, but apparently being perfect for each other. Not all of us have Komatsu's ability to create models (designed in a total intuitive way) that seem to have been done in a single step and that each fold is in function of each and every fold. But now I can be bold and say that with dedication, time and a lot of self-criticism, you can get to very good solutions for the global problem of the model.
