Apple.com: Robert Lang profile “The Art and Science of Paper Folding”

My daughter Sophie is currently enrolled in a Chinese language immersion school. She’s in kindergarten now and her teachers have started introducing the kids to simple oragami projects for crafts time. Then, in a sweet bit of synchronicity, her godfather received a book on some creative origami projects that you can make out of dollar bills for Christmas and brought it over for dinner a few weeks back. We were both schooled handily when we tried to make a Klingon Bird of Prey out of a greenback.

Today we stumbled on this feature in the Apple.com Science section, promoting the creative things you can do with a Mac. Robert Lang uses traditional materials — and his giant 30″ Cinema Display — to make some of the most incredible origami I’ve ever seen.It serves to remind me of two things. First, I’m really lousy at making small folds. I can serviceably fold letters into envelopes. I can fold cardboard into piles for recycling. And the extent of my ability to fold money ends at folding it in half, into my wallet. But what Lang can do with paper is the rough equivalent of folding space.He uses Mathematica to get it all done. He builds simulations that extrapolate the folds and show him how the finished piece will look based on the sim. And he does these things commercially.

Lang can design and fold some projects in an hour. More complicated patterns take months. “When I have a commercial job, of course,” he adds, “I work on it until the schedule says I have to deliver. I can guarantee that I can produce something in a couple of days that’s going to meet the needs and expectations of the client.”

This story gets to the heart of my mission as a storyteller: that people are motivated to buy through images evocative of use and success thanks to it. And Apple has built on this concept magnificently over the last five years, using the website to deliver some of the most compelling use tales in mass marketing computer marketing. What most companies deliver in the unapproachable white paper, Apple delivers through a sound investment in corporate media.What stories can your products and services tell?