Technical and Beautiful

ATLAS PhD student Ruhan Yang blends papercraft and circuit design to make engineering more tangible, accessible and fun for tinkerers of all ages. 

Yang began her academic career with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from CU Boulder in 2019. As an undergraduate, she co-founded EdBoard, a simple and intuitive circuit-building platform with easy-to-use magnetic electronic components to teach engineering skills to young learners. EdBoard has since launched two successful crowdfunding campaigns, driving hundreds of pre-orders for its products.

But an aspiration to deepen her skills as a designer led her to pursue a master’s degree in creative technology and design at the ATLAS Institute. 

“I had this engineering (side), and I needed to learn how to make things beautiful,” she said.

As a master’s student, Yang began attending weekly meetings at the institute’s ACME Lab, which researches computational tools for design, creativity, cognition, tangible and embedded interaction, and computing for health and wellness. She soon became an ACME member, working among others adapting humble materials for new means of computer interactivity.

But when the pandemic struck, Yang instantly lost access to most of the materials and fabrication tools ATLAS students usually have at their disposal. 

So she did what any creative designer does when faced with such an obstacle: she sought a new way to move forward.

Drawing on childhood memories of her grandmother teaching her origami and other traditional papercraft techniques, Yang shifted her focus to paper as a medium for tangible interfaces and interactivity. Low-cost, easily accessible, recyclable and versatile, paper is ideal for exploring ways to bring engineering principles to more people. 

“I love making, and I want to share this joy with more people,” Yang said.

The endless possibilities of paper intrigued her enough to keep studying it even as other resources became available once again. She developed a series of paper robots and explored haptic feedback to show that even paper can respond to touch the way so many devices in our lives do.

“We are doing engineering design,” said Professor and ACME Lab Director Ellen Do. “Sometimes it’s problem solving, but it is also problem finding.” 

Engineers have explored paper as an interface before, but the material does not inherently offer haptic feedback without extremely complex designs. Yang has found simple, elegant solutions by working within the constraints of a single letter-sized sheet of paper paired with everyday craft supplies and off-the-shelf magnets.

Yang recently completed her comprehensive exam and continues research for her dissertation, “Paper Modular Robot: Circuit, Sensation Feedback, and Geometry.”

Next, she hopes to launch Paper Builders, adapting EdBoard circuit building technology to papercraft to give aspiring engineers hands-on experience in designing cool things.