As you may have seen, the Google Doodle for March 14, 2012 is made of origami and celebrates the 101st birthday of Akira Yoshizawa, the father of the modern origami art. Origami has a multi-century history as a folk art in Japan, and Yoshizawa was not the only, or even the first, of his countrymen to take up the creation of new origami figures in the 20th century. But his work, more than anyone else’s, influenced the worldwide practice and set it on the path from craft to art (indeed, established origami as an art). He created thousands of new designs, developed new folding techniques, invented wet-folding, and designed the notational system that is still used today to convey origami instruction. So, all in all, he is a most worthy subject to be honored by a Google Doodle!

And why do I write about it here? Well, Google asked me to help put this together, which I was most happy to do, and they also asked me to write up a little bit about Yoshizawa and what I did for their Doodle blog. You can find that here, along with a permanent record of the Doodle.

Of course, if you are reading this at the right time, you can see the Doodle on the main Google page, “in the wild,” so to speak. (If you are reading this at all, it means that people following links to my website haven’t crushed the web server. If you aren’t able to read this, sorry, it means that they have, and the NetSol host is curled up in the corner, whimpering.)

The Google Doodle of the Day is nominally up for 24 hours, but by strategically visiting different Google servers, you can find it over a period of about a day and a half. It comes first to the easternmost national domain, which happens to be the island of Tonga, then works its way around the world. My own time zone (California, in Pacific Time Zone) is one of the later ones; my Hawaiian friends get the last shot at it.

Here’s how it all came about. A few weeks before the date, I was approached by Google. They already had the notion (they get suggestions from all over, I was told) and they already had a concept: they wanted to fold the Google logo with origami, and then decorate it with some of Yoshizawa’s figures. I suggested his iconic butterfly, to which they readily assented.

They asked me to develop a couple of concepts for different ways of rendering the logo. (That would have to be an original designs, of course.) I thought of three different ways of rendering the letters, folded the letter “G” for two of them (you can see them in the article linked above), but I really, really liked he second version after I’d folded it, so even before folding the third, I sent them the first two, hoping that they’d love the one I liked as much as I did and so I wouldn’t need to fold the last. And fortunately, they did.

At that point, two major efforts swung into action. One was mine: designing and folding the remaining logo letters. That was actually pretty easy. Although the crease patterns look superficially complex, the style of folding has been around for decades (it is the basis of the famous “Troublewit” magic routine), and there is a very straightforward technique for transforming any outline into the crease pattern.

The real heavy lifting came in the second effort: getting permission. Of course, no permission was needed, other than Google’s, to design and fold their logo. But if we were going to show Yoshizawa’s butterflies, we needed to get permission from his estate, which meant from his wife, Kiyo Yoshizawa, who manages his affairs and his organization, the International Origami Center. Mrs. Yoshizawa does not speak English and does not use email: our work was cut out for us.

For that effort, I enlisted two people from OrigamiUSA, the American national origami association: Jan Polish and Marcio Noguchi, both of whom have been deeply involved in international origami relations. Marcio, in turn, contacted Makoto Yamaguchi, owner of Gallery Origami House in Tokyo and one of the leading figures in Japanese origami today. Yamaguchi-san made contact with Mrs. Yoshizawa and secured the necessary permission, for usage of his butterfly, for use of Yoshizawa’s image in the photos in the article for the Google Doodle blog, and, most importantly, her blessing for the entire project.

Meanwhile, I designed and folded. Google wanted the letters folded in their traditional colors (or as close as we could get). I chose Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper, which comes in a wide range of colors so I could approximate the Google colors reasonably well. It also comes in fairly large sheets, so I could fold the letters in relatively large size (which allows a crisp appearance) and, because it is fairly stiff, it provides good contrast between the sharp creases and flat facets.

The pleated “Troublewit”-style letters allow for a deterministically computational design; in fact, the creases could be constructed using a method akin to compass-and-straightedge mathematical constructions. So the creation of the crease patterns was very fast, but that led to a problem: how to efficiently get the creases in the right place on the paper that was actually going to be folded?

Beginning a few years ago, I started to explore using an industrial laser cutter to score paper for origami crease patterns: initially using borrowed equipment at Squid Labs, courtesy of Saul Griffith, and then eventually obtaining my own system. By the time of the Google project, I had developed an efficient workflow that could take any crease pattern, process it with some custom software I’d written for Wolfram Mathematica, and turn that into a scored pattern on any sheet of paper.

So, I sic’d my scoring software onto the patterns for the Google letters, which transferred them crease patterns onto the Canson Mi-Teintes and cut out sheets of the appropriate sizes for the letters. An hour of so of folding the scored paper patterns resulted in the finished letters for the logo. And then that was followed by folding a range of butterflies from Origami Dokuhon I, Yoshizawa’s 1957 masterpiece.

The Thursday before D-day was set for photography. Two folks from Google showed up and spent a few hours arranging letters and butterflies for the shoot. I have a small photography setup in my studio that I use for shooting the images on the website. Via a process vaguely reminiscent of cooking nail soup, bits and pieces of my own setup gradually got incorporated into the Google shoot: seamless backdrop, halogen light, museum mount, wire, drafting tape, glue, and more. The Googlers had fairly definite desires on the colors and sizes of butterflies, so at their request, I’d bought a pack of 100 different colors of origami paper in preparation: they picked out colors, requested sizes, and then I cut the paper to size and folded butterflies to order.

One of the fun things about photo shoots is that the preparation can take hours as the subjects are arranged, tweaked, manipulated, re-tweaked, and test shot after test shot is made; but when everything is exactly right, the photographer takes one shot, says “that’s it!” and you’re done! And that was the case with this shoot. It was like climbing a mountain: you work your way up toward the top, getting closer and closer, and then boom: you’re there, nothing more to do.

A few shots from the photo shoot are below.

The precreased letters.

Folding in progress: collapsing the lower-case g.

My first draft, and some sample butterflies.

After folding the first round, I realized I was a little bit off in the x-height of the lower case letters, so I tweaked the crease patterns so that the letters would more closely match the logo letterforms.

Improved letters, with better x-height.

After everything was folded, the Google Doodle team came over and we set up to shoot (in my typically junky studio).

The shooting setup.

In order to line up the baselines when all of the letters were sitting on a flat surface, the lowercase “g” needed to be moved forward considerably. You can see here that it’s nearly cut off at the left. (It’s photos like this that explain why I’m not a professional photographer.)

Close-up of the letters with some butterflies

But when you’re at just the right angle, everything lines up!

The camera's eye view gets the baselines of the letters aligned.

And finally, after much tweaking, attachment of butterflies, and bouncing of photons, here’s the final result.

The Google Doodle for March 14, 2012

Update: I’d written a longer article about the “making-of” for Google’s blog, which was edited down for their final. I’ve combined that article with this one to tell the whole story; you can find it here.

There is an old joke about the difference between cats’ and dogs’ relationships with their owners: to a dog, their owner is God, while to a cat, the cat is God. To our 14-year-old black lab, Meg, every human being she ever met was a God, and they all preached the same theology: “And God stretched out his hand, and threw the ball across the room. And it was very, very good!”

We have had at least one, sometimes two, dogs our entire married life, Diane and I. She had a dog even when we began dating, and it was clear from the get-go that this was going to be a doggie relationship; it was clear that to Diane, if one of the two beings vying for her affections had to go, the four-legged one was going to be the one that got to stay and climb up on the bed. Over the ensuing 25 years, I have enjoyed all our dogs, even the Evil One named Siri (because, after all, who can’t resist being a deity, even if the mortal beings are disobedient?), but Meg was especially sweet, even when she was being terrorized by her younger “sister”, the Evil One (“sister” in quotes because she was not a genetic sister; the Evil One came to us as a stray and deployed her feminine wiles to seduce us all before she unveiled her true colors).

But Meg was always pure, innocent, and happy, and when, at the age of 10, Siri passed quietly in her sleep, Meg finally had the run of the house and the undivided attentions of us all, especially of Diane. She was always obedient and friendly to a fault. Siri had possessed the uncanny ability to detect the exact moment when she could snatch something from the counter unawares (and then sneak off to the far corner of the yard where she could devour it in peace; no dummy, that one), but Meg knew what was off-limits and never betrayed her owner’s trust. Except for bananas. Even the world’s most perfect dog has her weaknesses, and an unguarded banana or portion thereof, left on the counter, was considered by her to be fair game. In the grand scheme of things, it was a small and tolerable weakness; would that we humans’ failings were so trivial.

Eventually, though, gravity and age proved a greater impetus for obedience than mere doggie will-power ever could, and Meg could no longer get her paws up on the counter, no matter what good things proclaimed themselves to her nose as being just out of her reach. That happy nose received its own rewards, though, on the regular walks that Diane took her around the circuit of our neighborhood, where she could keep up on the goings-on of every other dog on the street. We can only imagine the pleasures that reside in the accumulation of dried piddle at every corner, but to this (and probably any) dog, it was ecstasy incarnate.

As time went on, the ailments piled up: knees to be realigned, growths to be removed, arthritis to be treated (and that powerful nose became her main weapon in the battle called Hiding the Tramidol in Something Edible), and more. Eventually, strange, unidentifiable things happened (“something neurological”, said the vet), and the morning came when she could barely stagger to her feet and could not make it over the sill of the door, which prompted one more trip to the vet.

This morning she lay on a thick cushioned blanket and Diane held her head and fed her treats and bits of her old favorite, banana, as the needle slid into her hind leg. Presently, Meg closed her eyes and lay down her head, and went to wherever dogs go after a full and happy life. She was 14-1/2 years old.

There’s not much origami in any of that, but it made me think of an old design I had come up with back in the days when our doggie tally was still in the single digits, and so I pulled it out, cut a square of hanji, and made myself a small reminder of our recently departed. This one won’t steal bananas off the counter, chase balls, or any of that truly fun stuff, but it will remind us of a pure heart, a happy disposition, and the sweet, unadulterated joy that we rarely find in two-legged beings but seemed genetically programmed into those four.

Meg 1997–2011

In early 2010, I was invited to give a talk at a conference organized by philosopher Rob Pennock at Michigan State University, celebrating the 50th anniversary of a famous lecture by British novelist C. P. Snow, titled “The Two Cultures.” In this lecture, and a subsequent book, Snow bemoaned the widening gulf between the sciences and the humanities. Pennock’s conference brought together a range of thinkers and philosophers, or, as he put it, “20 prominent scholars who have thought about the importance of Snow’s work in the context of higher education and culture today or who exemplify his ideal of bridging the two cultures.” Whooie, heady stuff.

As is not uncommon when I receive such invitations, my first reaction was something like, “are you sure you have the right Robert Lang? I’m the one who folds paper thingies.” I might have added (but didn’t), “and I’ve never heard of ‘The Two Cultures.’” But he assured me that yes, he really was looking for me, and that he thought that the connections between origami and mathematics (on which I lecture fairly regularly) would serve as a perfect example of a bridge between the two cultures of arts and science. And, as there were several months until the conference itself, I figured that I could read up on this essay and then find some way to relate it to origami. A considerable sweetener for me for attending was the distinguished company, which included both Pennock and philospher Barbara Forrest, two personal heroes of mine for their roles in the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial about whether creationism could be legally taught as science (verdict: no).

And so, in May, 2010, I headed to East Lansing, where I spent a most enjoyable day and half giving my lecture and listening to other lectures on a wide range of topics on science, culture, philosophy (sample: “The epistemological gulf between the empirical disciplines and supernaturalism” — which, despite the scariness of the title, turned out to be fascinating), and teaching. Professor Pennock had suggested that the conference would produce a book, and so all of us who gave lectures would be expected to write essays for the book, and he rather broadly hinted that if I were to create a special origami figure somehow representative of Snow or his writings, it might find a prominent place in said book (and dare I hope: the cover?).

Alas, said book never came together. Although I and several others submitted our essays, enough people dawdled that the 50th anniversary came and went, and then the 51st anniversary…and eventually, it was officially cancelled. I was disappointed, of course, not least because I was looking forward to having my essay rub elbows with those of the aforementioned Pennock and Forrest (and others), but also because I’d come up with a just dandy rendition of The Great One Himself, C. P. Snow, who was anything but a dandy, and had a face absolutely made for origami.

As it turns out, I’ll be able to recycle portions of my essay for an upcoming publication (which I will write more about later), but the origami Mr. Snow will go no further than my website. I’ll post an image here, though, and the crease pattern is linked from its entry in the gallery, if anyone would like to give it a go.

C. P. Snow, from a single uncut square of Korean hanji.