This week was, to sum it up simply, a week about origami.
We had to submit our posters and videos of our origami robots as well as prepare for the presentation and exhibition on Friday, so for those of us who still had much left to do (read: many of us), it was a mad rush to meet the deadline.
To add on, as we all know from experience, deadlines are apparently very social things, rarely appearing in isolation. For our Information Product Design class, we also had to prepare a presentation for this week to talk about our progress with our products
Thankfully, we had already undergone about a year of training as SUTD students, so this situation was not unfamiliar to us. As it always is, we barely managed to make it out alive.
The IDP presentations were certainly very interesting. Many groups have opted to change their ideas drastically, with only 3 out of the 7 groups retaining their original idea. Of course, the core ideas of basically all the groups were still more or less the same as what they had started out with, but the directions that they were taking with the ideas were quite different from what we had seen in the previous presentations. I guess, as our theme mentor Prof. Sun Lingyun pointed out, “Design is all about redesign”.
We then ended the week with our origami exhibition and presentation.
Since we were grouped into groups of 2 or 3 people, there were a lot of different robots to look at (around 30 or 40 I believe?) so it was really cool to see the many different ideas that everyone had to make the robot work with simple mechanisms. Another interesting thing was that every single robot received some sort of award, which was something I haven’t really experienced myself. I guess positive reinforcement is the trend these days.
It was a really cool, albeit tiring experience learning about origami robots and we are certainly thankful to our teachers for guiding us along. Hopefully, we will be able to make some more origami robots during our own free time in the future.
