CURVED.IT: A design tool to integrate making with curved folding into digital design process

Abstract

The act of changing the direction of a sheet surface along a non-straight curve is a specific case of curved folding. From an architectural point of view, curved folding is an exciting operation. One or a couple of operation can generate highly complex shell-like spatial enclosure. From a digital design perspective, the implementation of curved folding with the built-in toolsets of available computer-aided design softwares is a challenging problem. The equilibrium state of curved folded geometry is needed to be found with a computational form-finding strategy. To use curved folding as a digital design operation, we introduce a new tool through developing a digital procedure for form-finding. The tool we develop can enable the experimentation with curved folding in the early stage of design process and facilitate the subsequent design development. In this article, we briefly present the literature focusing on curved folding in computational geometry, as well as the scope and description of a subclass of curved folding operation. Then, we introduce a digital tool, CURVED.IT through a design manual for its implementation and an algorithmic framework for its extension. Lastly, we discuss the design examples generated by CURVED.IT, and the potentials of the tool.