Throughout this inquiry project, I have been curious about how these origami designs are created. From my understanding, the origins of the original or traditional patterns are largely lost, but they laid the foundation for future designs; these patterns often stem from one of several “bases” that generally originate from an earlier design. Presumably, more modern designs are largely based on trail-and-error and experimentation starting from one of these bases. 

With that said, I stumbled upon a program called “TreeMaker” that was created by Robert J. Lang to design origami (see article here: https://langorigami.com/article/treemaker/). Using a variety of complex mathematical processes and graph theory, this program set out to help create new origami fold patterns based on user input. It has gone through 5 iterations, most recently being updated in 2015, but was initially started in the 90s. 

Ideally I would spend some time trying this software, but frankly based on the screenshots and videos I’ve seen it seems far outside of my capabilities at this time. Here is a quick demonstration video from the channel Carlson Choo on YouTube: