There is a lot of talk of additive manufacturing, a fancy word for 3D printing. It is called “additive” because the printer adds material in order to form a product. Roughly, this is how masonry works: you start with a stack of bricks (definitely not a house) and you add them carefully one-by-one until you have the finished product (say, a house).

Additive manufacturing is the opposite of subtractive manufacturing. In subtractive manufacturing a person or a machine removes material to form a product. Essentially, this is how classical sculpture works: you start with a big chunk of marble and you remove parts until you’re left with the Greek God that was inside all along.

There are other categories of construction techniques, one of them is folding manufacturing.

An obvious example of folding as a construction technique is origami: folding sheets of paper to create decorative figurines of animals or what have you. This endeavour, mostly known as artistic, has applications in seriously serious engineering.

A construction technique that is less obviously part of the folding category is crochet (and knitting and other similar techniques). In crochet, you start with a 1-dimensional material (yarn) and you fold it into some sorts of knots until it reaches a form in higher dimensions (2 for a blanket, 3 for a sweater).

Folding manufacturing starts with a low-dimension material (1-dimensional for crochet/knitting, 2-dimensional for origami). Each step in the manufacturing process is small (a stitch in the yarn, a fold in the paper). The repetition of variations of these small steps produces a higher-dimensional product.