Salazar Design is an art studio, laboratory, and design and engineering firm founded on the principles of synergy and interdependence.
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Our founder began folding origami after reading the story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Cranes 24yrs ago. From there he began folding origami vigorously from diagrams and books until he started designing his own 8yrs later. Though folding the world’s most complex origami required a great deal of precision, designing origami exposed Robert to an entirely different way of thinking about not just paper, but the world.
In origami every folded feature is intimately and geometrically interrelated with every other folded feature in complex and often unforeseen ways. Expanding the wingspan of an origami eagle might shrink the tail feathers, shorten the legs, and shift the wings forward and all else back, all to different degrees.
Designing origami required an understanding of complex interdependent systems and how to transform them, reliably, and consistently toward solutions.
It wasn’t many more years before Robert could design origami faster than he could fold them and it wasn’t long after that that he made plans to apply these newfound principles of synergy and interdependence to other complex interdependent systems.
In 2014, Robert founded Origami for an Interdependent World an organization whose mission is to use the accessibility of origami as a medium to express the accessibility of peace and environmental harmony. Through Origami for an Interdependent World Robert gave talks, workshops, had exhibitions, and raised awareness and funds for wildlife conservation projects.
Making interdependence tangible was also a purpose of sharing the work in person. In 2017, Robert brought Origami for an Interdependent World to the Wildling Museum of Art and Nature and Coal Oil Point Natural Reserve. These talks brought his work into places devoted to understanding and caring for the natural world, connecting the relationships within a folded sheet with the wider environmental harmony at the heart of the organization.
Supporting wildlife conservation gave the folded animals another role: they could become gifts in return for helping the living creatures they represented. Robert’s 2017 work included the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute fundraiser and Wild Origami for the World Wildlife Fund. For the latter campaign, supporters paired donations with origami gifts. Their responses describe receiving rhinos and frogs, and sharing the work with family members whose own lives were devoted to conservation.
Drawing attention to the northern white rhinos became a specific conservation effort in 2018. Remembering Sudan paired Robert’s origami northern white rhinos with support for Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The folded animals connected the subject of the campaign with something a donor could hold and live with. Supporters wrote about receiving their rhinos, recognizing Sudan in the folded form, and choosing to contribute again through the campaign.
Bringing attention to nearby wildlife also meant giving people a place to encounter it through art. At the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, Robert’s representations of marine life became part of an exhibition and a November 2018 talk. He introduced the works, their origins, and the wildlife and people they portrayed, extending the discussion from the construction of a folded animal to the relationships that gave it meaning.
Recognizing the variety of life along the Central California coast was the purpose of the collection shown at the Wildling Museum from November 2018 through March 2019. Steelhead trout, California condors and tarantulas appeared among the folded animals found in Santa Barbara County. The exhibition and opening talk brought these different forms together, making the local natural world the subject of close attention through the shared medium of paper.
At Lotusland, that attention turned toward the plants themselves. Walking among the cycads, Robert found the inspiration for a bright-red Encephalartos ferox seed cone. Capturing its character required more than an ellipsoid: the overlapping scales had to radiate around the form so it could be seen from every side. He developed a tessellation for a single uncut hexagon of foil-backed unryu paper and folded it continuously for thirteen hours. The finished cone joined Flora, Fauna, and Ganna in 2019, bringing the garden’s living geometry into the exhibition.
Supporting the garden’s care and conservation work also brought the making of origami before an audience. For Lotusland’s July 2019 gala, Robert folded a life-size red-crowned crane from a single uncut ten-foot square of unryu foil paper. The demonstration accompanied the celebration of the Japanese Garden’s reopening, extending his participation from displaying completed forms to sharing the process through which a sheet becomes a representation of life.
Searching for life on worlds around other stars requires a way to see planets whose light is overwhelmed by the stars beside them. Starshade would fly ahead of a space telescope and block that starlight so the telescope could study the planets and their atmospheres. Its large optical shield would first have to fit within a rocket and then unfold without opening gaps. Returning to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2015, Robert developed crease-pattern algorithms and tested folded prototypes with the Starshade truss. Through this work, he was also introduced to the merits of tensegrity and inflatable devices.
To support bases and long-term operations in the Moon’s permanently shaded regions, Transformers for Lunar Extreme Environments proposed bringing sunlight into places it could never reach directly. Large heliostats would gather sunlight on the surrounding peaks and redirect it into the cold, dark terrain below. Robert returned to JPL in 2016 to design these reflectors, combining origami, tensegrity and inflatable elements so that a large reflecting surface could travel within a small package and deploy where it was needed. He developed crease-pattern software and folded reflective composite prototypes more than two meters across, preparing them for high-altitude balloon deployment tests.
Studying another star system at close range would require a spacecraft to travel far beyond the worlds of our own solar system. Starlight proposed propelling an ultralight spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri with a laser-driven sail. As a lightsail designer with UCSB’s Experimental Cosmology Group in 2017, Robert simulated sail geometries and investigated materials and fabrication methods that could maintain stability under propulsion while limiting mass and maximizing reflectivity. He also worked on origami crease patterns that would allow the sail to begin its journey within a very small payload.
Searching for life in the oceans of other worlds presents a different problem: reaching water hidden beneath a thick shell of ice. NEREID proposed traveling to Europa, tunneling through its ice and exploring the ocean below. As a co-principal investigator on the proposal, Robert developed an architecture for robotic exploration, considering how a swarm of probes could communicate, move, obtain power and follow chemical gradients in the search for life. He also modeled and rendered concept probes within an ice-ocean environment, giving form to the proposed mission.
Exploring rugged terrain on other worlds requires a way to move through landscapes that are difficult to traverse. Giacobot approached that problem with an ultralight tensegrity walking robot that could change its leg length and deploy from a compact payload. At JPL, Robert led its development and worked on its design and fabrication, extending his experience with deployable structures into a machine intended to move through extreme environments.
The search for life around other stars also required an optical shield that could continue blocking starlight after strikes by micrometeoroids. A thicker shield could reduce the number of impact paths through which light would pass, but added mass would make the spacecraft harder to deliver and deploy. This became a new origami challenge for Starshade’s optical shield. Returning to JPL in 2018, Robert developed folded core geometries for ultralight sandwich-structured composites, seeking the stiffness, low density and bonding area that honeycomb could not provide at the required mass. He explored repeating geometries and folded prototypes, including Diamond Core.
A habitat for the exploration of Mars would need to arrive compactly and provide room for a settlement to grow. For Marstopia, Robert led the design of Desert Snowflake with Anastasia Prosina and Svetlana Krinochkina. He designed a modular geodesic dome intended to assemble and expand from a compact form, then built a prototype to explore its geometry. Desert Snowflake received the competition’s People’s Choice award in 2018. Robert also advised on the engineering of the team’s Peristalsis proposal, a moving habitat that received an Honourable Mention.
Bringing internet access to remote regions on Earth also creates a need for large structures that can begin their journey in a much smaller form. Bluewalker 3 brought this requirement into a communications array intended to unfold in space. In 2019, Robert’s work with AST concerned the origami and kirigami challenges of the large deployable array, applying the relationship between a structure’s compact and expanded forms to a different purpose.
Making space exploration accessible to people with disabilities means considering how a person can understand an unfamiliar environment through more than sight. Through Stellar Amenities, where he served as Chief Technology Officer, Robert worked with AstroAccess on two directional surfaces, symbols that connected routes to objects, and a handle conveying the direction and distance to the next handhold. All four designs flew on zero-gravity test flights. Their relationship between a symbol and its destination also suggested a use in museums, where tactile routes could help people with vision impairments navigate exhibits.
Search and rescue, disaster response, and operations in remote regions can require illumination where fixed lighting is unavailable. Reflect Orbital’s proposal to redirect sunlight from orbit offered Robert a way to approach that need through a deployable heliostat. In 2024, he brought his experience with Starshade and lunar reflectors to the design of mirrors for the proposed orbital-lighting system. The work connected the challenge of unfolding a large reflective surface with the optical requirements of directing useful light toward a chosen region on Earth.
Making clean water and useful heat more accessible was the purpose behind Orisun. A portable reflector could concentrate sunlight for cooking, water purification and desalination, while folding into a form that could be carried to where it was needed. In January 2017, Robert and his team brought a working paper and Mylar prototype to Startup Weekend at UC Santa Barbara, where it received first place. The team paired the physical design with customer research and preorders, considering how people would use a compact source of solar heat.
Making a personal room portable was the purpose behind Nook. Its design rendering shows a rounded, paneled enclosure with a circular entrance and a separate circular panel beside it. The rendering presents the idea at the scale of a room, extending Robert’s work from individual objects toward an enclosed space that could travel with its occupant.
Living and working on Mars would require furniture suited to lower gravity and to the limited space within a habitat. In 2019, Robert worked with Anastasia Prosina and Samuel Binkin on the Stellar Amenities ultralight chair, a study developed with SICSA. Robert contributed knowledge of materials and lightweight structures to the team. The team explored a collapsible structure with telescopic carbon-fiber poles and connectors made from ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. Its adjustable height and posture allowed one chair to accommodate different uses. The workshop prototype brought the questions of compact storage, lightweight structure and bodily support together in a piece of furniture intended for life beyond Earth.
Making respiratory protection easier to breathe through motivated Inspire during the COVID-19 pandemic. With funding from Liberty Medical, Robert designed an origami respirator using N95 filter material, aiming for higher airflow and longer-lasting filters. The design paired a small chamber around the nose and mouth with separate inhalation and exhalation filters, connected by one-way valves. This arrangement was intended to increase filter area while limiting the space in which incoming and outgoing air could mix. The published patent application also describes a washable central mask and replaceable filter chambers. It names Robert and Chris Outwater as inventors and records a provisional filing in October 2020.
That work brought the development of a deployable structure together with the practical questions of making it useful in everyday life. After leaving JPL at the start of 2021, Robert pursued projects through Salazar Design that extended from aerospace to architecture and medical devices. The studio, laboratory, and design and engineering firm carries forward his work with synergy and interdependence across these different settings.
Creating architecture among trees brought Robert’s work into Arboreal Architecture with O2 Treehouse. The collaboration extends the studio’s scope into spaces situated within a living landscape.
Designing the spaces people inhabit took Robert into architectural leadership at Habitats Aloft, an Australian architectural firm. He served briefly as lead architect before leaving after an injury.
Bringing geometric relationships into objects that can be worn is another expression of the studio’s work. In Geometria, wood pendants and earrings carry triangular, sixfold and open-star patterns at the scale of the body. Their solid outlines and open spaces give the repeated geometries different forms, extending Robert’s exploration of shape into wearable artwork.
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Robert Salazar’s volunteer recognition and origami display
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Research & Collections Newsletter, May 2010, page 10.
