Origami and the art of learning new skills
A post by Jason Kottke about origami got me thinking about how we learn new skills and the role of instruction. By coincidence, I spent some time at the weekend trying to do some origami myself. The Saturday edition of The Guardian newspaper printed some patterned and coloured squares to cut out, along with instructions to create cranes, cicadas, penguins and sloths, among other things. I had a go in an idle moment, and did fine with some and got completely baffled by others. The sloth, for example, totally defeated me.
Even with step-by-step instructions, there are some folds that you just have to play or experiment with in order to understand them. It might be better if you had someone demonstrating the procedure live, but I still think that there are parts you have to understand structurally in order to be able to do them properly. Like many complex skills, the best an instructor can do is to draw your attention to the salient parts of the process so that you’re not randomly trying things, and to steer you back on course when you veer off it.
Thinking along those lines, the photograph of the incredible origami silverfish created by Robert Lang, and the staggeringly complex crease patterns that go along with his designs are even more impressive. The crease patterns only show part of the story of course; you still need to know the pattern of manipulating the creases in order to create the 3D structure, and that seems unimaginably hard unless you’ve got Jedi-level spatial visualisation skills. As Robert Lang himself says:
The creases all work together when they are fully folded, but it is often the case that there are no intermediate states — no subsets of the creases — that can be folded together, which would form the individual steps. For such a model, the only way to assemble the model is to precrease all of the creases, then gently coerce them all to come together at once with a minimum of bodging.
[…] Small wonder, then, that to many people, the concept of an origami crease pattern as a form of origami instruction is more than a little reminiscent of a famous S. Harris cartoon in which a scientific derivation is described by the phrase “then a miracle occurs…”
I’m in awe of his ability to produce these amazing origami pieces, when I have trouble with a very abstract, 2D sloth and step-by-step instructions.
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"The sloth, for example, totally defeated me."
Isn't that the point of a sloth, you'll get round to it sometime.............
by Jonathan Briggs @ 16/02/2007 10:21 pm • Permalink •
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I always thought that Origami was the Japanese martial art of fighting your way out of a paper bag.
by Jonathan Briggs @ 17/02/2007 9:57 am • Permalink •
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I've never understand Origami, maybe later you would tell more about it?!
by Julia @ 17/02/2007 12:12 pm • Permalink •
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Temple Grandin, a livestock facilities designer and probably the most articulate person alive about what it's like to be autistic, described the kind of mind that produces complex origami figures (she was speaking here at Davis on Wednesday, showed a slide of an origami praying mantis and the complex folded pattern on the paper behind it): this is the product of a pattern thinker, someone who thinks musically/mathematically (unlike Temple, who is a photorealistic thinker, which is why she can visualize what kinds of things will make cattle go berserk and design facilities that calm them down). (The third kind of thinking she outlined was verbal.) In normal, neurotypical, people thinking is usually mixed in two or three of these ways, but in the autistic or asperger mind, one will generally strongly predominate. And, she says, without these specialist thinkers, we won't get iPods and cellphones, so give them the tools to make it through life and stop kids playing video games -- get them to program them instead. It was a fascinating talk.
by Pica @ 17/02/2007 1:49 pm • Permalink •
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I make an origami ball that takes many folds and about half and hour. At the end, you blow in a puff of air and le voila ... a ball. I took a good look at the crease pattern for the silverfish, but unfortunately I think I blew my cerebral cortex. Simply awesome!
Temple Grandin's insights about types of thinker is fascinating - thanks Pica.
by Jannine @ 18/02/2007 1:30 pm • Permalink •
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Oy - where's that edit thingy? ... half an hour... ... types of thinkers ...
by Jannine @ 18/02/2007 1:37 pm • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: Double groan!
Julia: I would do if I understood it properly myself...
Pica: Interesting - I saw a documentary about Temple Grandin once, and she was really interesting. It's certainly true that different kinds of minds are good at different kinds of things, and at their extremes, these types are part of a continuum that grades into what we view as pathology.
Jannine: That sounds fantastic - I'd love to see you do that! Creating a ball, that is, not blowing your cerebral cortex... Sorry about the edit button. It is there if you are logged in, but currently I'm the only one who can log in. So, not so useful... But it will be!
by bsag @ 19/02/2007 6:50 pm • Permalink •
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Origami is indeed a nice way to develop new skills. It's important in life to learn how you could push the limits, adapt and understand yourself better in the process.
by Profiles @ 17/05/2007 1:39 pm • Permalink •
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I supplied the artwork for those models and in an ideal world, would have included both more steps and more text. I'm glad you managed to do at least some of them!
by Nick Robinson @ 08/02/2008 6:14 pm • Permalink •
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