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For structural engineers, origami has proven to be a rich source of inspiration, and it has found its way into a wide range of structural applications. This paper aims to extend this range and introduces a novel engineering application of origami: folded textured sheets.

Existing applications of origami in engineering can broadly be categorized into three areas. First, many deployable structures take inspiration from, or are directly derived from, origami folding. Examples are diverse, ranging from wrapping solar sails [Guest and Pellegrino 92] to medical stents [Kuribayashi et al. 06] to emergency shelters [Temmerman 07]. Second, in contrast, folding is used to achieve an increase in stiffness at minimal expense of weight, for example in the design of lightweight sandwich panel cores for aircraft fuselages [Heimbs et al. 07]. In architecture, the principle is also applied, ranging from straightforward folded plate roofs to more …