folded polyhedra

Degree Project 2013

Jon Hills
www.jonhills.com

introduction

The goals of this project

were to develop an efficient and effective design
process, a fast fabrication method, and create
interesting and beautiful
forms. These goals have a
great deal of overlap with
each other. For example,
the fabrication process,
which was inspired by the
way structural packaging is
made, set limitations on the
forms which I could produce. The method of production proved to be very
efficient and fast. I ended
up with pieces that I could
very quickly produce even
in small batches using a
combination of digital fabrication, local manufacturing

services, and hand fabrication. The design process was

also quite successful. I was able to quickly iterate through
designs and got a large amount of information from the
models that I made. The forms were an interesting mix
of organic and crystalline shapes. The result was pieces
that looked balanced, light and airy, and structural.
The manufacturing process was inspired by the way packaging is made. A single flat sheet of material is folded into
a solid structural form. I wanted to adapt this process to
different materials and processes than are traditionally
used. At the start of this project, I generally knew the fabrication process that Id use- laser cut sheet steel which
was folded, welded, and powder coated. Although I didnt
fully explore this process until after I designed one piece
from this series, I kept the possible limitations of this process in mind as I began designing. I therefor had to do a
little bit of guess work in setting the constraints for what
I could and couldnt make. The formal and process constraints were inspired by those found in Jacksons text,
Structural Packaging: Designing Your Own Boxes and 3D
Forms. The limitations are any volumetric form which
has flat faces and straight sides. He also had additional

Flat Packaging Design

Inspiration from Structural Packaging: Designing Your Own Boxes and 3D
Forms by Paul Jackson

geometric constraints imposed by the material and

fabrication process: all of
his pieces came from a single sheet of paper and were
secured by folds and tabs,
using no glue.
The initial geometric constraints which I set were
very simple- folding a flat
sheet to create a single
closed polyhedron. Polyhedra are solids in three
dimensions with flat sides
and straight edges. In order to design within these

constraints, I needed an effective design process to allow

for the intuitive development of form. The design process
was optimized for iteration speed and level of feedback.
Having a fast iteration speed, and thus more iterations,
allowed for a more rigorous and complete exploration of
form. The level of feedback was also important for drawings and model making, the more information they gave,
the more refined the next iteration could become. The
initial design process I developed had three stages, each
with different types of feedback and design flexibility.

stage 1: rhino
3D Voronoi Algorithm
This formfinding helped influence the
aesthetic of the series.

The first stage of the design

process was form finding
within Rhino. Using a CAD
program as a method of
form finding introduces its
own restrictions just based
on what the program can
and cant do. In my case,
the forms I created were
from using planes cut into a
solid geometry- yielding an
unintended result of only
convex polyhedra. Once
the form was completed,
a flat pattern of the polyhedron was created using

Rhinos unroll command. These flat parts were arranged

to become a net (a single flat sheet with scores).
This stage in the design process was the most conducive
for iterative design. Designs could quickly and easily be
modified, though the results were very abstracted. Seeing something on a computer screen is very different than
seeing it full size out of some material, and it is thus much
more difficult to identify problems in the design.
I tried experimenting with algorithms to aid in form-finding. While I didnt produce any of these designs, some
of the aesthetics of the explorations influenced the rest
of the pieces. The first algorithm I began experimenting with was a 3D Voronoi algorithm. This was especially promising at first because the result of the algorithm
was aligned with what I could actually fabricate: convex
polyhedra. Voronoi diagrams are generated from a point

Rhinoceros Drawings
3D models and unrolled designs

Voronoi Algorithm
The process that creates the Voronoi
cells is illustrated above in two dimensions

cloud. The simplest case is a 2D Voronoi

diagram, which I illustrated above, but
it can applied to an infinite number of
dimensions. The input for this algorithm
is a point cloud and boundary conditions (some bounding box). Lines connect nearby points, and the midpoints
of these lines are marked. The Voronoi
cells are generated by lines perpendicular to the connecting lines which intersect the midpoints.
I applied a 3D Voronoi algorithm to
point clouds and yielded some interesting results. The polyhedra had way too
many sides with highly varying sizes,
so I couldnt realistically produce these.
Unsatisfied with the highly irregular
shapes from the Voronoi algorithm, I

applied Lloyds algorithm to make the

results more uniform. Lloyds algorithm
is an iterative method which moves the
points used in the Voronoi algorithm to
the centroid of the shape. As the number of iterations increases, the area of
the cells (far from the boundary) becomes uniform. In the two dimensional
case, the result is a tessellation of hexagons. The script I wrote was for the 3D
case, and Ive included the result and
the script.

Lloyd Algorithm
The script for implementing the algorithm
is shown below. This was run 10 times to
produce the image that is above

stage 2: models
Various Paper Models
These models provided additional information about how a design that was
lacking from stage 1

The next stage of the design process was fabricating and modifying scaled
paper models. The net created in the last stage was
printed onto card stock,
folded, and assembled.
Tabs were added to aid in
the fabrication of the model. At this point in the process, I could easily see the
relative structural strength
of forms, and what types of
geometries werent viable.
This stage provided different feedback than Stage 1,

and any changes could easily be applied to the first stage.

After these changes were applied, an additional iteration
through this stage would test the results.

Cut Lines
Score Lines

Cut Lines
Score Lines

stage 3: fabrication
L aser Cut Templates & Welded
Mockup
The templates were cut by a laser cutter in Pawtucket. They were assembled
by hand as can be seen in the mockup
photo.

The final stage in the process was full scale fabrication out of steel. A laser
cutting template was created by adding scoring lines
to the net drawn in the
previous stages. The laser
cutting was outsourced to
Precision Laser in Pawtucket. The cut steel was folded along the scoring lines
to create the polyhedron.
The planar intersections
that werent folded were
fixed with tack welds. At
this point, it was easiest to
identify problems- be it for-

mal, structural or functional, but there were virtually no

alterations that can be done to the piece. With this new
information, the first two stages can be iterated through
once more and yield a very well resolved final piece.
The strengths of this design process were twofold. The
first was the interconnection between the first two stages
and the final stage of the process. The first two stages
yielded a great amount of visual and structural feedback
that would be present in the final steel form. In addition,
the work done to complete these first two stages only
required slight alterations in order to create the file which
was used to laser cut the final piece. The second strength
of this design process was its speed. Successive design
iterations could take days, not weeks.
The pieces were finished by powder coating them. This
service was outsourced to Technodic in Providence.

observations
A more refined aesthetic was developed
by iterating through the first two stages
of the design process. I created additional constraints to the forms I created
to make a more polished and specific
formal language. These new rules were
based on intuition in addition to how
they fit with the rest of the rules of the
system. Offset curves were cut into the
faces of the polyhedra; this opened up
the forms, softened the hard edges, retained much of the structural strength,
and was very reminiscent of cellular
structures. Planar faces were comprised
of edges of comparable sizes. This is
because when one side got very small,
the form was very difficult to construct.

Many possible shape grammars were

avoided. Regular and symmetric polyhedra, for example, lack room for originality because of their fixed parameters
and cannot avoid connotations to mathematical models. Polyhedra created
with a tetrahedral meshing algorithm
were avoided because of how saturated
it is in the field of architecture and how
indistinguishable one project is from
another. Together, these intuitive developments led to an interesting and distinctive geometric system with visually
appealing and consistent results.

results

I completed three pieces

for this series, two tables
and a chair. The success of
the design process is very
difficult to measure in any
objective way. I can compare it to other design processes Ive used, but I think
it is best to just talk about
the relative strengths and
weaknesses of the process
in relationship to one of
the main goals: developing
form. The iteration speed
of every step in the process
made it very conducive for

exploring different forms. This allowed me to more quickly throw out awkward and bulky designs, and get to more
graceful and refined forms. In addition, each step of the
process gave me a lot of information; I could quickly and
easily see potential problems with a form.
The weaknesses of the design process were sizeable, but
definitely didnt outweigh the strengths. The forms I produced within Rhino were very limited by the program to
some degree. The most influential constraint that was a
function of my process in Rhino was that the polyhedra
were all convex. The second largest limitation was that
there was very little finessing that I could do with a cut
sheet of steel. If there was something wrong with the
piece, I had to do an additional iteration. There was very
little that I could do to adjust a piece. All in all, I think that
the strengths of this design process greatly outweigh the

Irregular Polyhedron 2
The natural setting for these pieces is
outdoors

weaknesses and that it was

a very effective method.
The fabrication process was
very successful; the pieces
took very little time to produce. Using a combination
of digital manufacturing,
hand fabrication, and local
manufacturers, I was able
to quickly build the final
forms. An interesting result
of this is that I could actually mass produce these
pieces relatively quickly
since the amount of hand
fabrication was very small

Irregular Polyhedron 1
The natural setting for these pieces is
outdoors

in comparison to everything else Ive built at RISD.

The success of the forms is difficult to determine, but
some of the results of the forms can be determined. The
asymmetry and irregularity of the forms yielded pieces
that feel dynamic. There is also an interesting dance that
occurs between the harsh crystalline-like edges and the
smooth cellular interior voids. The result is pieces that
look surprisingly organic considering the material and the
markings of the manufacturing process.

irregular polyhedron 1
An end table was fabricated according to
the design process and constraints. There
were many formal, fabrication related, and
structural discoveries throughout the process, many of which were outlined in discoveries/observations, which helped refine
the process as a whole. There were many
minor refinements which are too small to
include, like the scoring pattern for bends
less than ninety degrees was changed from
a series of rectangles to a series lines, for

example. The piece, even alone, has an inherent logic in it which speaks to a larger
system.

irregular polyhedron 2
The coffee table was initially intended to
be governed by the same constraints as
the end table. When it got to the stage of
fabricating the piece from steel, it became
apparent that folding it from a single net
wasnt going to work- it wouldnt fit on a
single sheet of 4x8 steel. This folding constraint made fabrication much faster and
more accurate for the end table. This constraint was dropped for the coffee table, allowing for the fabrication of a much larger

form. The craft of the piece suffered as a

result. Otherwise, it saw the same formal
success as the end table.

Irregular Polyhedron 3
The chair had the first large departure from
the initial set of constraints, now allowing
the polyhedra to be open or incomplete.
This constraint had made every design incredibly structural; virtually anything I designed would be strong enough to interface
with humans. Removing this constraint had
structural ramifications. The front two legs
could bend in and out because of flexibility
in the frame. A bar was welded onto the
front of the chair, which fixed this issue, but
this certainly isnt the best solution. It is a

quick fix more than anything else. An additional iteration is needed to more gracefully
address this issue.
The leg design broke another constraint.
It became apparent that either additional
polyhedra would be required to create the
legs or a new system entirely. Rectangular
steel tubes were tried first, but the visual
language was drastically different than the
shell. Triangular legs were designed with
offset cutouts. This resulted in legs that fit
visually with the top.

moving forward
Mass Producing One

of a

Kind Designs

I think that there are two

directions that I need to
explore to get this project to the next level. The
first is taking advantage of
the one-off nature of the
manufacturing
process.
Im not taking advantage
of the fact that I could be
laser cutting a unique form
each time. The manufacturing process wont notice a
difference, and the piece
would truly be one of a
kind. Currently, I only have
a single net for each of the
forms I designed, and if I
make changes to the forms,
I have to make a new net.
I should implement a Rhinoscript that adds some
degree of randomization to
each of the basic forms Ive
arrived at, and updates the

net accordingly. That way, each person gets their own

unique piece. I think this would justify the fabrication process over a more mechanized and efficient process, and
drastically improve the marketability of the product.
The other part Id like to develop is the functionality, audience, and marketability of the pieces. I think if I honed in
on each of these further, and used what Ive learned from
the exploration of forms, I could get even better results.
While I wasnt considering these goals in my project, I
can still access what Ive made in relation to these goals.
The functionality of these pieces varies a great deal with
their context. I think the series works well as outdoor
furniture: they work well visually around nature and are
weather resistant. The metal is too harsh for an indoor
environment, and because of the hard corners isnt safe
for children. The tables function well as tables, but the
chair has some ergonomic and structural issues that must
be addressed. The audience of the pieces is the crowd of
people interested in high-end, modern, and locally manufactured design. The forms are way too weird for Joe
Six-Pack. All in all, I think these pieces have a lot of potential, and addressing these goals and implementing the
one of a kind process could really take this series to the
next level.

Sources:
Weisstein, Eric W. Voronoi Diagram. From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wol
fram.com/VoronoiDiagram.html
Jackson, Paul. Structural Packaging: Design your own Boxes and 3D Forms. Laurence King Publishing,
2012.