We’re working on a cool project at Adaptive Path, and during the week of March 14th, we had an open design session to collaborate on ideas about the project. Much of our work lives in the digital realm, so it was a rare treat to have a physical maquette to play around with. It was astounding to me how many ideas we had just by holding, folding and cutting up the paper model. Alexa takes the cake in pushing the ideas pretty far out there.

Earlier in the week, I brought in some of my treasured paper-arts and pattern books. A partial list is below.

Plaything:

• Myriorama “The Endless Landscape”

Paper Engineering:

• The Pop-Up Book: Step-by-Step Instructions for Creating Over 100 Original Paper Projects by Paul Jackson
• Elements Of Pop Up: A Pop Up Book For Aspiring Paper Engineers by David A. Carter (Illustrator), James Diaz (Illustrator)
• Pop-Up Origamic Architecture by Masahiro Chatani
• Paper Magic: Pop-Up Paper Craft by Masahiro Chatani
• Cover To Cover: Creative Techniques For Making Beautiful Books, Journals & Albums by Shereen LaPlant
• Non-Adhesive Binding – Books without Paste or Glue by Keith A. Smith
• Folding Patterns for Display & Publicity by Pepin Press
• Gift Wrapping: Creative Ideas from Japan by Kunio Ekiguchi

Fun with word and pattern:

• Inversions by Scott Kim
• Dimensional Typography: Words in Space by J. Abbott Miller
• Creating Letterforms: Calligraphy and Lettering for Beginners by Rosemary Sassoon and Patricia Lovett
• Designing Tessellations : The Secrets of Interlocking Patterns by Jinny Beyer