- Hi, I'm Robert.

J Lang,
origami artist and physicist.

And today I've been challenged

to go through levels of
complexity with origami.

[invigorating music]

There's many ways to define

complexity for origami.

It could be the total number

of folds in the design,

it could be the number of folds

you have to bring together at once.

I'm gonna use a combination

of those two measurements

and illustrate it

by going through different

levels of complexity in a cicada,

one of the classic traditional

subjects of origami.

As a disclaimer,

this is my interpretation of complexity

as it applies to origami.

Cicadas are very familiar

in the Japanese culture,

in part, because in summertime

they make a huge racket.

Not just in the countryside,

but even in downtown Tokyo

the sound of cicadas can be deafening.

Within the origami world,

they have a particular significance,

because Yoshizawa, the great

Japanese origami master,

considered his own cicada

to be his greatest creation.

And so many origami artists

have felt the need, or the desire,

to create their own version

of this iconic insect.

My level one would be the

traditional Japanese cicada,

because it's one of the simplest

folds in all of origami.

It's just a handful,

maybe one, two, three, four,

five, six, seven, eight steps,

all simple folds,

and yet it reads very

strongly as a cicada.

This can be folded by almost

anyone in just a few minutes.

It consists of nothing but Valley Folds,

the simplest fold in all of origami.

Although it only has a handful of folds,

there's a few places where you can put

your personal stamp on it

by making Judgment Folds,

folds that don't have a

specific reference point.

In particular, the angle at

which you fold down the wings,

and then the angles at which you fold down

these two corners on the top

are done pretty much by eye.

By adjusting those folds positions,

a person can adjust the character

and the finished shape of their cicada.

For level two, this is a

little bit more complicated,

because it incorporates a
few more judgment folds.

But notably, it has a

fold called a Petal Fold.

That petal fold is built

from two folds called Swivel Folds.

We'll start the same way,

in fact, this'll be based pretty much

upon the traditional cicada.

But now, we wanna do a
few things differently.

We'd like to make the wings longer.

If I fold it down with a valley fold,

that's all the length

I can get from my wing.

But if I'm willing to do

a more complicated fold,

I can get longer wings.

And that more complex fold

is called a Swivel Fold.

And so, with my more complicated fold,

I'm gonna move it down and

create this little pocket,

which I will then flatten.

When I fold the flap down,

I'll have to fold it

underneath the pocket formed here.

But if I do that,

I can fold it down,

and then tuck some of it underneath,

and that's a Mountain Fold.

And then the last little bit

is I fold the valley fold down,

but then fold the paper back.

I'm gonna leave a little

bit of color exposed here.

And the reason I'll do that,

is that when I then fold the edges inside,

same as I did before,

my cicada will have colored eyes.

So although this is still

quite stylized, geometric

and a little bit abstract,

I think it's closer to

the form of a real cicada,

and it reads a little

bit better as a cicada.

For level three,

we're still doing a fairly

simple abstract cicada,

but we've added a few

more folds of complexity

and we've added some Squash folds,

which allow us to shape the

wings relative to the abdomen

and give a little bit

more of a teardrop shape

which matches the wing

shape of an actual cicada.
I'll do a squash fold.

Lift a flap up,

I put my finger inside, press it flat.

That's a new fold.

It actually combines
making multiple folds,

'cause I'm creating a fold here and here,

the same time that I'm bringing it down.

It's a Combination Fold,

but that allows us to achieve

a little bit more shaping.

We're adding what are

called Crimped Folds,

which let us both create distinct eyes

and also give the body a little bit

of three dimensional roundedness.

So gonna do a crimp,

that's putting a valley

and a mountain right next to each other

and the mirror image on the backside.

So there's the crimp on the front,

do the same on the back,

press 'em to set the crimp.

And then I'm gonna fold
the corners underneath,

which will lock the crimp in place,

and then that also allows me

to open the model out.

As we add details to the origami design,

we travel along a continuum from abstract,

the highly realistic.

This is my level for design,

which is a cicada designed

by the great Akira Yoshizawa.

From this point onward,

the folding is sufficiently complex

that I'm not gonna fold

them from start to finish,

but I'll fold through

until we can see the base

and the basic structure.

The reason we have such a

big jump from three to four

is we're going from

representations without legs

to representations with legs.

A cicada has six legs,

so our number of legs needs

to make a big jump right there,

go from zero to six.

So just as we need to make

a big jump in the number of legs,

we'll also need to make a big jump

in the complexity of folding.

- This level four design, by Yoshizawa,

he used a rectangle that

takes eight bird bases

and put them together into a rectangle.

[paper crinkles]

This is the crease

pattern for the bird base,

and you see this star shaped motif.

And that little star shaped

motif is repeated eight times

in this crease pattern,

that when folded looks like this.

So a row of two across and eight along

makes it possible to fold

this fairly complex base,

that it has enough flaps

to get all of the legs,

as well as the wings and

other features at the cicada.
This is my level five design.

It's a cicada that I

developed back in the 1980s.

It coincidentally shares
a lot of its structure

with Yoshizawas in that it's built

from a rectangle that has an

array of bird-based patterns,

but the next step in this march of realism

will be to put in the antenna.

Even though the antenna

are quite small on a cicada,

they're definitely noticeable,

and so we do that by
adding two more bird bases

to the pattern in the rectangle.

Make the rectangle a little bit longer,

add a few more features,

and then we can get antenna,

as well as eyes, wings, and legs.

So one of the steps up

in creating the base,

we have to fold some layers together,

and then unwrap one layer

that's wrapped around another.

This layer's wrapped around another.

And then, I unwrap it

so that it comes down.

And this layer, that gets turned up.

That gives another base

that's pretty similar

to the Yoshizawa base,

but it has two long flaps

and crucially, the addition

of two small points

one here and one here.

And so this step of

unwrapping is the next step

in this sequence of cicada designs.

This is my level six.

Now, even though rectangles started

to become pretty common

in the '60s and '70s.

The 1980s in the world of origami

people felt like it was an

aesthetically desirable thing

to use squares.

Most traditional origami

designs came from squares.
There's a certain geometric
elegance to a square.

So even though rectangles allowed us

to create more complex shapes

like cicadas with legs and antenna,

we thought, can we do that from a square?

But getting points like

legs, long skinny appendages

that come from the interior of the paper,

require quite a bit more

in the way of planning and design

and also in the complexity

of the folding steps themselves.

This design used some additional folds

we haven't seen yet

called Rabbit Ear Folds,

and they're pretty easy,

but it also required a fold called

a Closed Unwrap and a Closed Sink.

And these are now quite famous

in the world of origami

for their difficulty.

[paper crinkles]

I wrap the layer from back to front.

These are pretty difficult to do

without ripping the paper,

it's called a Closed Sink.

I'm going to put this point inside

in a way that locks the edges together.

And I have to do that,

by opening it up

a little bit and then refolding.

And when I'm done, the point is gone

and there's a little pocket,

and the edges are locked together.

But the reason we use them,

is it allows us to create
combinations of points and flaps

that in this case will give us the legs

that we want from a square.

This is my level seven design,

and we can also do a

side by side to this one

to see how things improve,

but it's folded completely

differently from level six.

One of the things we'd like to do

to increase the realism

is to make all of the legs
very thin and delicate,

have none of them come

from the interior of the paper.

But the only way to ensure that happens,

is to start planning the

design from the beginning,

so that the legs don't

come from the center.

And to do that,

we use a new technique

called Circle Packing,

in which all of the long

features of the design

are represented by circles.

So each leg becomes a circle,

each wing becomes a circle,

and things that can be big and thick

like the head or the abdomen,

can be points in the middle.

The basic folds of origami

like mountains and valley folds

have had names for years, even decades.

And some of the other combinations

of two or three mountains and valleys

have also been given names

like Reversal or Rabbit Ear.

But as we move up the level of complexity,

we find that we need to

start putting together groups

of folds in unique ways

that have never been done before.

And so these folds don't even have names,

because you might not encounter

that exact combination ever again.

But in many cases,

these new combinations of folds arise

when we're trying to create a new point

from somewhere in the

interior of the paper

and that happened in this design,

which bumps its level of complexity up

one more than the previous.

This is level eight Shizuoka cicada.

It's one step up from level seven,

because it has even

thinner, more delicate legs

and more graceful teardrop shaped wings.

This required yet another new design.

In all the previous designs,

we could fold the model sequentially.

Start with a square,

do one step at a time,

maybe do a few folds at a time,

but we could break the

folds down into a sequence.

But in some designs,

you might have 10s,

or even hundreds of folds

that all have to come together at once.

And when that happens,

we call that a Collapse.

I've got my six legs here,

two flaps for wings, a

long flap for the body,

these cross pleats would be

used to segment the body,

and then some extra paper

up here for the head,

and I can use these

corners to create antenna.

And there's our finished Shizuoka Cicada.

For my level nine version of a cicada,

I thought we would move

to a Juvenile Cicada,

because it has some additional features

that demand additional complexity.

One is that a Nymph Cicada

has proportionately longer legs.

So we need to get longer flaps,

but we still have to make

them very, very skinny.

But most notably,

it has a lot more structure on the claws.

It's got a pointed front claw,

and then a spine at the base of each claw.

We can also add segments,

distinct segments for the abdomen.

To make this happen,

we go again to the technique

of box pleating or square packing.

And this time, we'll have

a lot more little figures,

a lot more squares, a

lot more objects to pack

to get all these small features,

the spines, the eyes, the scale.

That gives rise to a more

complex crease pattern,

one that has more folds.

And then that fold too,

requires a collapse to
bring it all together.

We have a square or a rectangle

for every little pointy bit on the shape.

So we have little squares for the spines,

little squares for the claws,

large ones for the legs,

small ones for the antenna, and so forth.

And we have to pack all

of those into the square.

And then from that packing,

we construct the crease pattern

that has not only more up and down

and side to side folds,

and that therefore gives rise

to this crease pattern with more folds

and a more complicated collapse.

This is my level 10 design,

which is a Flying Cicada.

And what makes this more complex now

is that it has four major flaps

that come from the interior of the paper:

head flap, abdomen, and two of the legs.

The reason we need those extra flaps,

is because now it's flying.

We need four really large flaps

to make the wings.

Cicadas have four wings.

Four large wing flaps

take up most of the

side edges of the paper,

and so then we have to get other features

from the interior of the square.

The folds that generate

those middle points are

harder, they're more complex.

The fact that we have four of them now,

more than we've ever had before,

is what puts this into the

next level of complexity.

My level 11 design is a cicada.

We're back to the classic pose.

But this deceptively simple design

actually has the most complex folds

of everything we've done before.

Just in terms of the design,

this is actually a step

backward in complexity,

because it's just an array of bird bases.

But in terms of the complexity

of actually folding,

this is the most complex

of anything that we've looked at.

It contains closed sinks, mixed sinks,

mixed wraps, combinations

of all these folds,

and a very large number of them.

So, many, many individual folds.

Those middle points require

much more complex folds

than any of the steps

that we've done leading up to this,

and that's what makes this

the highest level in this series.

Those are my levels of complexity.

You might have your own levels for origami

or whatever your pastime might be.

Wanna thank Wired for
giving me this opportunity,

and wish all of you happy folding.