Kirigami is the Japanese art of cutting and folding paper to create three-dimensional structures. The word comes from two Japanese roots: “kiri,” meaning cut, and “kami,” meaning paper. While origami transforms flat sheets through folding alone, kirigami adds strategic cuts that unlock shapes and behaviors impossible with folds alone. What started as a paper craft has become a design principle used in solar panels, medical implants, robotics, and advanced materials engineering.
How Kirigami Differs From Origami
Origami and kirigami share a starting point (a flat sheet) and a goal (a three-dimensional form), but their rules diverge in one critical way. Origami allows only folding. Kirigami allows both cutting and folding, and often permits reconnecting pieces with tape or glue. This single difference has major consequences for what each technique can produce.
Because origami relies solely on folds, you can always unfold an origami structure back into its original flat sheet. Kirigami creations that use adhesive to rejoin cut sections can’t be unfolded to their original state. They become permanently transformed. That trade-off, giving up reversibility, is exactly what gives kirigami its structural versatility. Cuts let sections rotate, tilt, pop up, and lock into geometries that pure folding can’t reach.
Origins as a Paper Art
Kirigami as a named technique traces back to the 1980s, when Japanese architect Masahiro Chatani began experimenting with cut-and-fold paper designs while a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His early work focused on designing original greeting cards, but it quickly evolved into what he called “origamic architecture,” elaborate pop-up structures of buildings, castles, and geometric forms made from single sheets of paper. Chatani refined and popularized the technique until his death in 2008, and he remains widely regarded as the foremost origamic architect.
Today, kirigami as an art form ranges from simple pop-up cards to intricate paper sculptures. Some artists combine kirigami with digital design tools, using laser cutters to execute precise patterns that would be difficult to achieve by hand. Architects have also experimented with kirigami principles at building scale, using its geometry to inform facades and deployable structures.
Two Fundamental Cut Patterns
Despite the enormous variety of kirigami designs, most of them build on two basic templates: parallel cuts and cross cuts. Parallel cuts are rows of slits running in the same direction, offset from row to row. When you stretch or fold a sheet with parallel cuts, the material between the slits bows outward, creating a lattice of tilted elements. Cross cuts use intersecting slits to divide a sheet into polygon-shaped facets connected at their edges or corners.
What happens next depends on how those facets connect. If the cut facets share sides with their neighbors, they can rotate out of plane around those shared edges, producing step-like 3D surfaces. By carefully distributing cuts and folds, you can build up complex topographies, essentially sculpting a landscape of small elements at different heights from a single flat sheet. If the facets connect only at their corners, they gain even more freedom: they can rotate both in-plane and out of plane, transforming a square sheet into a circular shape or curving a flat surface into a saddle. These two connection types, side-connected and corner-connected, form the building blocks for nearly all kirigami engineering.
Why Engineers Care About Kirigami
The real explosion of interest in kirigami came when researchers realized that strategic cuts could give ordinary sheet materials extraordinary mechanical properties. A flat sheet of plastic, metal, or even graphene that would normally be rigid can become stretchable, shape-shifting, or capable of unusual responses to force, all without changing the material itself. You’re just changing the geometry.
One of the most striking properties kirigami can produce is called auxetic behavior. Normally, when you stretch a material in one direction, it gets thinner in the perpendicular direction (think of pulling a rubber band and watching it narrow). Auxetic materials do the opposite: stretch them lengthwise and they expand sideways too. Kirigami achieves this through two mechanisms. One relies on facet rotation, where cut panels twist in response to pulling, pushing material outward. The other creates honeycomb-like structures through cutting and folding. In an inverted honeycomb pattern, the angled walls push inward when compressed, causing the whole structure to shrink in all directions at once. Even graphene, one of the stiffest materials known, can be made auxetic by introducing the right kirigami cut pattern.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated kirigami structures that can support 14,000 times their own weight while remaining lightweight and foldable. Some of these designs avoid adhesives or fasteners entirely, meaning they can be flattened and refolded repeatedly without losing strength.
Solar Tracking With Cuts Instead of Motors
One of the most elegant engineering applications of kirigami is in solar energy. Conventional solar panels either sit at a fixed angle or use motorized tracking systems to follow the sun across the sky. Both approaches have drawbacks: fixed panels miss a lot of available light, while motorized trackers are heavy, expensive, and require maintenance.
A team published in Nature Communications showed that kirigami-patterned thin-film solar cells can track the sun through simple stretching. The concept works by making precise cuts in a thin solar cell sheet, then applying tension along one axis. As the sheet stretches, the cut elements tilt in unison, changing the angle at which they face incoming light. The result tracks the sun’s position to within plus or minus 1 degree, matching the accuracy of conventional single-axis tracking systems.
These kirigami trackers proved mechanically robust, with no measurable drop in performance after more than 300 stretching cycles. By optimizing the cut geometry to minimize stress at the cut points, researchers reduced the energy loss from repeated deformation to as little as 3% over 1,000 cycles. The entire system stays flat, lightweight, and requires no motors, making it a compelling alternative for installations where weight and profile matter.
Medical Devices That Fold Small and Deploy Big
Kirigami’s ability to transform between compact and expanded states makes it especially useful in medicine, where devices often need to be inserted through small openings and then expand inside the body. Researchers have created bifurcated stents (tubes that branch into a Y-shape to support blood vessels) using kirigami patterns cut into shape-memory polymers. These stents can be compressed for delivery through a catheter, then expand and lock into their branching form once in position.
Porous metal implants for orthopedic surgery have also been designed using kirigami and origami principles. These implants can be folded small enough for minimally invasive insertion, then deployed to roughly twice their compressed dimensions once inside the body. The porous structure helps avoid a common problem in bone implants: stress shielding, where an overly rigid implant prevents the surrounding bone from bearing its normal load, leading to bone weakening over time.
Soft Robots With Multiple Movement Modes
Soft robotics, the field of building robots from flexible materials rather than rigid components, has adopted kirigami as a core design tool. Traditional soft actuators (the components that generate movement) tend to produce a single type of motion: they bend, or they stretch, or they contract. Kirigami-inspired cuts applied to soft pneumatic actuators allow a single device to produce multiple deformation modes, including bending, stretching, contraction, and combinations of these.
This versatility matters because real-world tasks rarely involve just one type of movement. A soft gripper might need to extend toward an object, curl around it, and then contract to pull it closer. With kirigami patterning, a single actuator can handle all three motions depending on how it’s pressurized, reducing the number of separate components needed and simplifying control. These actuators can also be 3D printed, making them accessible to researchers and engineers without specialized fabrication equipment.
From Paper to Graphene
What makes kirigami so broadly useful is that the principles are scale-independent. The same cut patterns that produce a pop-up paper greeting card can be applied to metal sheets, polymer films, or atomically thin materials like graphene. At every scale, the cuts introduce controlled flexibility, shape-changing ability, and tunable mechanical responses into materials that would otherwise be rigid and static. The sheet doesn’t need to be paper, and the cuts don’t need to be made with scissors. Laser cutting, lithography, and even chemical etching can produce kirigami patterns at scales from meters down to nanometers.
This scalability is why kirigami has moved so rapidly from art to engineering. The geometry does the work, regardless of what the material is or how big the structure needs to be.