How 14-year-old Miles Wu is using origami to design stronger shelters

At 14, Miles Wu is exploring how an ancient paper-folding technique could inspire stronger and more portable structures for emergencies. An eighth-grade student at Hunter College High School in New York, Wu spent the past year investigating the Miura-ori, a geometric origami pattern known for folding flat sheets into compact forms.

His interest grew as he read about disasters including the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene. He wondered whether the pattern's combination of strength, portability and ability to fold flat could make it useful for deployable shelters. To test the idea, Wu created 54 different Miura-ori variations, changing their dimensions, fold angles and paper weights. The strongest designs supported an extraordinary 9,069 times their own weight.

His project, titled ‘Optimising the Strength-to-Weight Ratio of Miura-Ori Patterns,’ was selected for the 2025 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. The details of his experiment and background are documented by the Society for Science.

Miles Wu found an engineering question inside his love of origami

Wu had been folding origami for seven years when his hobby began developing into a scientific interest. During the past year, he became particularly fascinated by the Miura-ori, a repeating arrangement of parallelograms that allows a flat sheet to collapse into a much smaller area.

The pattern immediately suggested a practical possibility. Because Miura-ori structures can be folded flat and transported compactly while retaining considerable strength, Wu began thinking about their potential use in emergency shelters.

His idea was also shaped by natural disasters. While reading about events including the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Helene, he considered how emergency structures need to be transported, deployed and made strong enough to protect people. Rather than beginning with a large-scale construction project, he reduced the problem to a simpler question, which version of the fold can support the most weight?

He tested 54 versions of the Miura-ori pattern

Wu designed his experiment around three main geometric variables.

He tested two parallelogram heights, three widths and three fold angles. He also compared different types of paper, ranging from ordinary copy paper to heavier cardstock. The combinations produced 54 distinct variants, with every folded structure opening to an area of 64 square inches. Wu then placed each design between guardrails, keeping the structures five inches apart, before progressively adding weight until the folds collapsed.

The experiment required considerably more force than he initially expected. To carry out the later trials accurately, Wu had to obtain 50-pound exercise weights. His strongest folds ultimately supported 9,069 times their own weight, producing a striking strength-to-weight result for such lightweight structures. His results also revealed that the geometry mattered significantly. Smaller panels combined with steeper angles produced stronger structures, while surprisingly, ordinary copy paper performed better than the heavier paper he tested.

A centuries-old folding technique could inspire emergency shelters

The potential application behind Wu's experiment is particularly relevant after disasters, when shelters may need to be moved quickly and deployed in areas where conventional construction is difficult. A Miura-ori-inspired structure could, in principle, be compressed into a relatively small form for transport and then expanded at its destination. Its repeating geometry could also allow a large surface to be created without requiring a correspondingly large volume during transportation.

But Wu's research is not yet a finished shelter design. His experiments tested folded paper structures under increasing loads rather than a full-scale building exposed to wind, rain or other forces. Turning the result into a practical emergency shelter would require different materials, larger-scale testing and engineering analysis. What Wu has demonstrated is the underlying principle, geometry can dramatically alter how efficiently a material carries weight.

A structure does not necessarily need more material to become stronger; sometimes, changing how that material is arranged can make the difference.

His origami research could be the beginning of a bigger scientific journey

Wu's project is part of a much broader interest in origami that extends beyond the science competition. His fascination with folding intensified during the pandemic, and he later entered his creations in the Origami by Children competition. Some of his work has even appeared on the holiday tree at the American Museum of Natural History.

He has also used origami for a charitable purpose, folding and selling 200 origami pigeons of his own design to benefit the Wild Bird Fund.

Despite his current engineering-focused research, Wu says he hopes to become a biologist, with particular interest in how plants and animals survive and thrive in cities. His Miura-ori experiment therefore sits at an interesting intersection of art, mathematics and engineering. What began as years of folding paper became a systematic investigation involving 54 structural variations and hundreds of measurements. The result does not yet amount to a disaster shelter ready for production. But Wu's work demonstrates how a simple question, how much strength can a carefully folded sheet produce? can open the door to much bigger ideas about lightweight structures, efficient materials and emergency design.