Origami in Business & Research

The other day a friend from San Francisco was telling me about his fascination with origami as applied to business. The comment was related rather to the leaness of foldings and to the economy of energy to accomplish a task: something like, you can accomplish a three-dimensional shape by folding a two-dimensional one using the minimum amount of energy (folds). At this time I had not hear of Robert Lang.

Robert Lang works as free-lance paper artist and scientist, implementing what he has learned from his folding experiments in concrete technical applications. Concurrently with the Japanese biochemist Toshiyuki Meguro, Lang discovered in the early 1990’s that each component of an origami figure can be reduced to a basic circular shape.

Origami principles are also used by innovative technology companies to develop new products. The German company Easi Engineering, which works together with almost all of the large European car manufacturers, to pack airbags, folded with the help of origami software, in the steering wheels. Robert Lang was hired as a consultant for the development of solar sails for satellites and fold-able optical lenses for space telescopes.

I find extremely interesting to think of the applications of the origami principles to business management. It could be translated in a desire to simplify and distill management practises to a lean organisational structure. Providing innovation or flexibility and modulation with the least energy and with a goal of optimisation and improvement: to fit in the most efficient form a volume into a limited space; to make it a “killer application” (like in the case of the airbag, a life saver)