0:00 Office cuz I was like, “Where are they?” And I saw I was like right on this river over these mountains in the background. That looks nice. Can I come to Dirty Brooklyn and get us some storm? Thank you. Yeah. Hello, my name is Julia and I’m here from STILFOLD and we have recently added this tagline to our name which is greener by every fold. So I decided to call this talk greener by every fold, strength in every curve.

0:29 And we are a design and technology company who which is located in Sweden as you heard. And up on top here you have our management and down there you have me and my title is that I’m a computational geometry software engineer which basically means that I work with our internal softwares. Yeah and we are mixed team of engineers and industrial designers. And what we do we call an origami inspired production technology which we envision more or less something like this.

1:05 We say origami inspired because we are folding. We take a a sheet of material primarily metal and we fold it into shape and we draw a lot of inspiration from traditional origami and origami research. In some of our communication you will see that we call it industrial origami and this is to communicate that we are targeting the industrial scale and that that sort of level of automation.

1:36 However, like some people who are really into origami knows that you are not supposed to cut sheets when you do traditional origami. And do we cut sheet? Yeah. We are making like functional products. So obviously we give us ourself the freedom to cut them. So if you’re going to be like theoretical about it, it’s sort of more like industrial kigami. And for us everything started with this.

2:06 This is steel ride which is an electric motorcycle. And this was made like during the early days of this company which is now STILFOLD. And the steel ride is an electric motorcycle. And therefore, you obviously want to be able to go a really long distance on a single shark. So you want a large battery and a low weight. And you still want like sort of a streamlined shape to it since you do not want to take up too much wind resistance.

2:34 So the idea here was that the chassis should be made the chassis should be both the supporting structure and the external structure. We did not want to have an internal structure and then a cladding on top because we wanted to have more space inside. So we and doing so we realized that we could actually lower the amounts of parts quite a lot and of course also while it was relatively light even though it was made from a premium material and yeah the whole chassis is made from one sheet.

3:13 We made several versions of this bike and this is the latest and you can see that the chassis the the refinement of the chassis has improved and that is because alongside the bike we started to develop a production technology because at that time there was obviously a lot of other sheet metal like techniques to shape sheet metal but none that really sort of fitted for our purpose because you have traditional workshop craftsmanship where you have like people just hammering away at metal, which is great if they’re good at what they do, but the level of automation is really low and it’s not really good for production.

3:54 You also have really good straight folding techniques, but they have a very limited form solution space. And you also have like sheet metal stamping, which is really good, have a big really large form solution space, but it’s very cost intense. It takes a lot of energy and therefore it’s very high volume prone and it’s because you need to make a mold for every stamping and you have need to have access to a a really really really big press.

4:29 So we started looking into curved crease folding. Curved crease folding has been explored in research for quite some time now, but it has had some difficulties to make it its way into the industry because there is some tricky parts to it. It however has several advantages because when you fold over and yeah, curved crease folding is exactly what it sounds like. You instead of folding straight, you fold over curves.

4:59 And when you do that, you actually also get some strength to the material. So here’s our industrial designer, Ricardo, who is jumping away at a sort of wavy curved structure of 1.4 mm aluminigma. You also do get like its own design expression when you’re doing this, which sometimes is good for external surfaces. And if you sort of squeeze a bit, you can say that our process is more or less like this that we have a digital design, we get a fold pattern, we put it to manufacturing, we get a folded part and we can assemble it into a product.

5:45 But in real life, of course, nothing is ever this linear. So we do a lot of jumping back and forth. And especially the first parts of the process we do several times because we do also do a lot of prototyping in other materials than metal before we do go into the metal folding. What the process looks like also depends a lot on the like where it starts like where does the inquiry come from because we noticed that there are many companies who are also experienced a gap here.

6:18 So we have like steel ride was our own product but since we have done a lot of projects with other companies more most of them are of course in mobility or vehicles but not exclusively and we also do projects together with research in institutions and universities. We also get some clients who are only interested in our manufacturing technology and they want to buy a machine like ours because they have like machine some sort of metal production already but they want to make them in the way that we do.

7:02 And we think that’s great because our long-term goal is not to make a factory like located in the north of the world from which we’re going to send folded parts across the globe because it doesn’t make any sense. So we like to consider it more as microactories. So if other people wants to buy your machine, great. And doing so you can actually fold close to demand and theoretically then or I mean this is our envisioned future you can design folded structure anywhere in the world and then send it to be folded close to where it’s needed however to achieve this process but yeah for now we are doing most of the process ourselves and to achieve to be able to achieve this process We had to develop tools for every step of the process.

8:02 From CAD tools to the actual machinery to fold stuff. Because what we you sort of have to start asking yourself is how would this look folded or what does this folder pattern look like? Because a lot of our process is actually going back and forth between a 2D fold pattern to a 3D structure to ensure that we can make this fold pattern and this 3D structure is delivering whatever it’s needed for this product because we do always have a like specific function in mind.

8:48 We unfortunately don’t do art. So we do have sort of very precise requirements to do so you do always have to rethink the geometry from scratch because even if you have a folded part which looks like it could be folded you will have to rethink it because as some of you know more than others we are working with folded developables and folded developables are made out of developables surfaces.

9:23 And for those who haven’t worked with developable surfaces, that is a surface that you can sort of make flat without distorting or cutting into it. Developable surfaces also has a serial gaussian curvature which means that you cannot make shapes such as spheres or domes. And you can usually categorize developable surfaces into different types depending depending on what the rulings look like. And the rulings are the lines that goes across the surface here.

9:58 But since we are making folds, we do not make one developable surface. We always makes at least two. But if you want to have a function, we are going to have to make more surfaces. So we will have to consider them a network of developable surfaces which are connected by faults. An example is this and this is a research project that we did together with a company which called cookar and rise and this is a modular takeoff and landing platform for drones.

10:31 And here you see this is this is sort of a a very simple geometry in one way because the requirements are quite straightforward. It needs to have like a flat surface on top because it needs to land somewhere and you have to meet the ground. So naturally, it will also have to have some sort of flat surface underneath. But yeah, you need to connect connect the two with some sort of curve.

10:54 And then you get sort of this here. You see that the green areas are flat surfaces and the yellow area cylindrical surfaces. And this way of thinking that this is this kind of surface, this is that kind of surface is not completely straightforward. We have in-house industrial designers who sort of learn this way of thinking but most people do not have like it’s not built into us and we do want this to be sort of widely spread.

Yeah. Then here we have the the virtual the platforms on our workshop floor just after production. Yeah and to the right we also made a topology optimized version of this together with Toyota labs just to try it out. But as I said like to think in this way of network of developable surfaces is not super intuitive but it’s crucial for making this kind of objects. So we had to develop a set of tools to either model developable surfaces straight away or analyze geometry afterwards.

12:13 So either you can think of it is in terms of surfaces or you can focus on controlling your creases. And what I think is most interesting about this from my perspective is that this actually is a lot of a UX challenge that how we communicate what you can do and what you cannot do in a in such a way that designers can sort of know how to react to it.

12:38 So yeah, in some situations some forms are not that easy to model. So then we do also follow by a sort of a form finding process and that’s good for situations where you either need a very rough early estimation of what the material would would look like or when you’re going to make shapes like this because in this case you would probably not expect this to be the outcome if you make this kind of folds.

13:14 However, when we fold in this way we might get some double curvature into structure. So then we will have to have a layer of of analyzing analyze on top to show that can we produce this or not because through the projects we have made we have discovered that or I mean it might be sort of obvious but it has really been confirmed to us that how we place our creases and the exact disposition of them like how the the curvature of them you can say h matters a lot for the performance of the structure and in that process our designers are actually crucial to place the to place the curves.

14:07 We as we as the rest of the world obviously are working on integrating prediction into different part of our process. But as of today our industrial designers are still the drivers behind this process and what because what we need to establish as early as possible in the process is can we produce this because we do not want to waste a lot of time on something we can’t cannot make.

14:40 Because we have developed an incremental folding process and incremental folding is also a area of research that’s been around for some time and we have adapted it in this way that we have sort of a wheel which rolls across the surface and press the surface in a point along the curve and then we do this in a number of passes until we reach the angle We want and this and yeah and to do this we have built a set of folding machines and this is an early folding machine which was sort of manual you could say and this is our latest folding machine which has a bit of a higher level of automation.

15:29 And here you can sort of see how the wheel presses down on the surface and you have cones underneath which rolls and then you get the shape. And we are currently in the process of planning our third folding machine to have even to both increase automation and the size and precision. Huh. Okay. Yeah. But to wrap this up a bit, what we are trying to do here is that we want to democratize curved crease folding.

16:18 And by that I mean that we want it to make it a more accessible process. But to do so, we do rely heavily on software and we will continue to do so for forever probably. Because we do need a really high level of automation in the actual production if we’re going to have this situation where people are producing anywhere across the globe and we cannot control it.

16:45 We do also have to put a lot of emphasis on the user experience because we it’s not feasible to have to have the situation where designers have to train for years to be able to learn how to design in this way because we think that this production technology is actually a good greener option for producer to form metal sheets because you can reduce parts which simplifies the whole pro the whole chain.

17:19 Since you build some strength into the structures, you can also reduce weight but more so since you do not try to sort of push or press the whole sheet. You can reduce the material usage quite a lot by simply just paying a lot of attention to where you place the curves. And of course long term we envision this to also be simpler logistics since sheet metal ships flat and you can produce close to demand.

17:54 And however like how much like the numbers you can see in the bottom of the screen of course depends a lot on the part you’re making because some stuff are much more better suited for this than others. And if you are interested in making something bolded, you can contact us. Our CEO Jonas, he really likes projects and collaborations of all sorts. Or if you want to ask me something, you can of course contact me. So thank you. To see the full recording of this and previous presentations, as well as information about future CDFM events, visit CDFAM.com.