For my free inquiry project, I have decided to document my experience learning some basic origami through a series of blog posts. I chose to look into learning origami as I thought this could be a great creative outlet for me, especially during times where I have a significant amount of academic and course material to focus on. I remember learning some beginner origami when I was in elementary school, however it has been a long time since I learned or created anything in the field. 

For my first post in this journey, I would like to briefly discuss some new information that I have learned about origami after looking into it this week. Origami is the art of folding paper (usually squares of paper) into objects or animals. The roots of origami may have ties to Japan, China and Europe (Robinson, 2026), and the name origami is derived from two Japanese words: “oru” which means fold, and “kami” which means paper (Tateishi, 2011 as cited in Meloni, Cai, Zhang, Sang‐Hoon Lee, Li, Ma, Parashkevov, and Feng, 2021). It appears upon first glance that there are many different styles of origami, and that a significant number of origami hobbyists have immense experience experimenting and creating different types of origami. I look forward to exploring these more through hands-on learning in the coming weeks. 

After my initial research, and being inspired by the creativity of others, I am even more eager to begin to learn a new skill this fall. In my next inquiry post, I will pick a beginner origami to explore and document my learning and experience. It will be interesting to review these blog posts at the end of the term and see my growth, new skills and the mistakes that I will learn from!

References:

Meloni, M., Cai, J., Zhang, Q., Sang‐Hoon Lee, D., Li, M., Ma, R., Parashkevov, T. E., & Feng, J. (2021). Engineering Origami: A Comprehensive Review of Recent Applications, Design Methods, and Tools. Advanced Science, 8(13). https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202000636

Robinson, N. (2026, October 28). origami. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/origami

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash