The Fitful Flog

These are Persimmon Boxes, so named because of a paper by Naoko Takeda which discusses, among other things, self-locking kaki folds. Kaki, you see, is Japanese for persimmon. A good read, that. I’ve been experimenting with these kaki folds this week and decided I had been using them for a while now, but it’s good to have a name to hang on them.

This model is fun — it’s sturdy and has an interesting interior space. You hold it up to the light and it suggests a hyperbolic cube, but this is a chimera. I mean, it’s developable and all. The long axes on the sides are straight lines — these lines suggest a tensegrity icosa, but that’s best ignored for the time being. What’s really going on here is the intersection of three hyperbolic cylinders.

This would make a good container. One of these days, I’m going to buy me some of that white food-grade paperboard and go to town. You build a better Chinese take-out container and the world will beat a path to your door. But the world will have forgotten the hot mustard and will still want a tip, even though the fried dumplings will be all sweaty and stone-cold. This is where you will tell the world to get off.

Persimmon Box Crease Pattern