For her junior independent project, Audrey Zhang designed a dress, but it was no ordinary dress.

By incorporating precise origami folds, Zhang transformed a collection of fabric and paper into an artistic representation of a quantum memory drive. An art and archaeology major, Zhang turned to engineering to use intricate folding patterns that evoke how the past sends flickering images in her work “Origami Memory Dress.”

Zhang, who often incorporates technology into her art, worked with civil and environmental engineering professor Glaucio Paulino’s research team to apply origami patterns to her design.

 “Incorporating origami into my work has enabled me to iterate through engineering designs in a tactile way,” said Zhang, who noted that the pattern in her dress, called a Miura-ori tessellation, also has applications like satellites that unfold in orbit. “Origami also taught me how to give new form and properties to materials like paper, an idea I plan to explore more in my art.”

Now a senior, Zhang again used Miura-ori patterns as part of her thesis project “StarSail,” a conceptual design for an interstellar bioship that can terraform exoplanets to restart human civilization. The ship features Miura-ori petals as solar sails. Zhang said engineering illuminates “tangible ways of realizing the far-future ideas I visualize through my art.”

Zhang and Paulino, the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering, say both disciplines gain from working together. “Art inspires engineering, and engineering inspires art,” Paulino said.