Tie
I designed this origami tie in order to illustrate a point I’m going to make in a not yet published part of my series on origami classification. The point is that a model’s classification regarding its subject might be a feature of a particular work rather than of the design. I differentiate between three main types of subjects: figurative, abstract, and origami-first designs. The latter are objects such as boxes which are not figurative since they do not represent any objects existing prior to the origami model, but which can’t really be called abstract either. They are real-world objects created from the ground up with origami. This distinction makes sense to me, but it leads to certain paradoxes.
Consider this tie, folded from a square sheet of paper. If the folded tie is small, it could be considered a figurative model, representing a real-world object which is a tie made from cloth. However, I folded this tie in actual size (lacking a large enough sheet, it’s closer to actual size of a children’s tie: adult tie is included in the picture for comparison). This means, it’s a practical object that one could use rather than just the image of an object. Its structure is also a bit different than that of a cloth tie, so it’s not just reflecting already existing tie designs, but rather a new tie type in its own right. This would imply that the same origami design should be classified as a figurative model if folded small, but an origami-first design if folded large. Which is a rather surprising conclusion.
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