 My placemat at breakfast was paper, and it was flat, which to you probably seems pretty reasonable. And to me is totally irresistible, because I love to get my fingertips on paper, and I am a paper engineer, which means that my job and my drive is to make paper not flat anymore. In this case, I made one cut, made a couple folds, I inverted the center crease, and along the way, I created a very simple pop-up. Two, really, there's a top and a bottom along the way. I have new creases to work off of, four perimeter valley creases, two mountain creases down the center. That is a technical way of saying, look, I made a mouth, right? It wants to be a mouth, and I'll tell you why it wants that, because paper and ink have been lovers for millennia. It is so easy to augment this notion. We make two circles, we make two dots, four marks on the page, and we have a face. Five marks on the page, and we have Lakshmi. This is one of two main types of pop-up. This is called a page-action pop-up. The energy of opening a page makes something happen. The other main type is called an interactive. This is like that. It could be in a book, it could stand alone. This is one piece of paper, cut and folded. This is also glued. It's one square foot that becomes one cubic foot. I love it. If you think this looks like math, we agree. If you think this looks like magic, we also agree. It's that combination that gets me charged about the craft and the art of paper engineering. I'd like to take you on a little brief survey of some of the basics of paper engineering. Starting with one of the first pop-ups that I ever engineered solo. This is by Jonathan Langley. It's the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. There's your page-action. You open up the book, and that makes Goldilocks scarf up the baby bear's porridge. And a couple pages later, you have your interactive. You pull a tab, something happens. Two things, really. She sits and then her skirts go, yeah, actually I was very pleased with myself when I finally figured this out, because it was hard. I was in the early days. Not all pop-ups were kids. This is an adult book for the cigar-smoking market. Pop-ups make really good reference material. So that's a tobacco plant that you can peruse. And not all pop-ups are for books. This is a pop-up play set. This is the Chronicles of Narnia. These were happy meals. So tens of millions of these were made and distributed around the globe. This is by far the most popular thing that I ever worked on. And I'm going to segue to the least popular thing I ever worked on. This never got off my desk, but I really like it. You pull the tab and the sun, and it's raised, rotate around a common point in opposite directions. Here, I liked it so much. I used it again. Instead of rotating the two pieces, pivot in opposite directions around a common point. Again, this is a technical and pretty unenthusiastic way of telling you, look, I made something that I think is clever or cool or lovely. And I want to share with you today three offspring that I tried to make clever, cool or lovely. One came to me in a dream. One came to me by accident, and one I actually put a lot of effort into. The first would be this. What do you do with this guy? This is the villain of an animated movie about bugs. The client wanted a doll or a stand-up figure. I wanted something with more than that. That's what I'm thinking about on a Friday, right? And on a Sunday morning, I woke up from a dream with the blueprints for this in my head and on my hands. And I ran over in my underwear, and four minutes later, remarkably fast, I had this. Now, it's pretty rough. That's how paper engineers work. It's a sketch in paper, but it's enough. It's enough to give me this, right? This is a second stage of this little figure. Now, he was deemed a little too rough for the kids, but we did apply this technology to the other characters. The future queen of the colony has long, elegant wings. Notice now this piece is all one integrated piece, nice and clean. One piece of paper printed both sides, neatly folded on itself and glued to itself. There's the other hero. He surfs on a leaf. A younger sister has comically stubby little wings. And this guy has no wings, but he rocks back and forth in a jolly way, right? Same mechanic. I hadn't seen anything like this before, and I guess no one had either. So the company actually applied for patent in the name of the inventor. That's U.S. law. I'm the name of the inventor. So I have a U.S. patent, which is sort of good news, bad news. The good news is I'm proud of it. My grandmother is ecstatic about it. But the bad news is I think it requires an asterisk because my subconscious actually invented this. The next thing I want to share with you is something that was more of a conscious effort because I worked pretty hard on it. This is my attempt at making in paper this old wooden or plastic toy called the tumble cube. I hadn't seen it in paper before, but more compelling to me, I hadn't seen anyone really use volume before, right? Most children's learning blocks and even Rubik's cubes are all about the surface. I wanted to maximize that volume. So I worked with an artist named Susan Mitchell, and we came up with the Christmas box. It's interactive. It's red. There's things to touch. Some are tantalizingly out of reach. Some of them are right up front or behind windows. There's things to take apart. And it's got a lot of different configurations. And every time you have a configuration, something moves. There's a door to pull, a drawer that opens. There's this little scrapbook. It's a mouse family getting ready for the holiday season. Notice now the red of the outside is about to become the blue of the inside. There's eight cubes here with six facets each. That's 48 total facets. We're looking at half of them. That's 24. 24 things to play with. 24 is the number of days leading up to Christmas. So when I thought of that, when I'm in the prototype stage, I said, that's what I'll do. I'm going to make an advent calendar that's interactive. And that's what was satisfying to me, and I thought I was done. I got this prototype on my desk, and one whole side of it fell forward. It was badly taped. My first thought is, crap. My second thought is, hello, secret compartment. Because that's what that is, and that's what that became. And it worked its way into the final design. So there's a secret compartment. It's the outside of the mouse house. Santa's sleigh is on the top of the roof there, pulled by a red robin. I like that touch. This is the inside. The mouse family's snugging their beds ready for the holidays. I'm going to show you in close-up. Now take a look. On the left is a rocket and a box. On the right is a crescent moon and a window. There's a secret compartment. Mama, papa, mouse, or sleeve-in. Brother mouse is sleeping. Little baby mouse is crept downstairs to see Santa just in time to put the presents under the bed. Now inside that grandfather clock, upside down, facing the other way is a rocket. Underneath that stairway, of course, is a crescent moon, and the whole thing folds back together, ready to go under your Christmas tree. And the final project I want to share with you is paper engineering gone wild. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted on this. It was pretty rare, but I wrote it, and I engineered it, and I even illustrated it with, predictably, paper sculpture. It came out a couple years ago. It's called, If I Were a Polar Bear. White as an iceberg from head to toe, I'd set out alone across the snow. The boldest explorer you'd ever seen if I were a polar bear, I mean. And this is just a lot of paper doing the talking. It's not about snow. It's about paper. And I start with a curve because curves are hard and I'm showing off. Even that flat piece has contoured curves. And you've got these footprints. They guide you on your path past the old snowbound shack of explorers who came, but got cold and turned back. And of course, you can get in there and see what the explorers left behind, right? It's a map in there and a calendar and apparently a dartboard. And this is a cheat. No engineering at all on this. I made the polar bear make a snow angel for two reasons. One, I like it. And two, I'm saving paper because I have big plans for this book, and this is my big plan. The whole reason I did this book. I wanted to do an igloo. That's a dome. That's very three-dimensional. Got a little sled and a fishing hole by it. And again, more paper freak stuff because this is shiny paper for the water and glossy paper for the footprints and matte paper for the ice. A little bit of color, a lot of drama. Bear jumps in, comes back out. Where is he? There he is, the North Pole. South, south. Anywhere you go is south. If I were a polar bear, I'd be so proud. When I reached the pole, I'd growl out loud but adventure awaits. And so off I'd go one step ahead of my tracks in the snow. And that's it. That's how the book ends and that is how this talk ends. And I want to tell you, let me share with you five marks on a page. You make five marks and then figure out what to do with it. You add the folding and the cutting and the gluing. Then you add something old school. You add a printing press and ink. And if all goes well, you're going to come up with something. That is something that I like. That is a bear that I find clever and a landscape I find cool and an object that I find lovely. That is paper that I can touch. That I don't need digitized anytime soon because I am a very playful and progressive man but I am a stubborn craftsman. I don't want to show you what I make. I want to hand you what I make so that you can touch it too. Thank you for having me.