After electric fans and air conditioners took over the function of cooling, the project asks in what other ways a traditional handheld fan can return to contemporary daily life
The project responds to a single question through multi-version formal experiments — when habits of use and design contexts have both changed, can the structural language of an old object still hold up in new materials? Origami runs as the throughline across the work, its possibilities continually retested in three different materials. Ver.1 uses paper to explore the minimalist quality of the material itself; Ver.2 turns to fabric, pursuing lightness, water resistance, and elasticity; Ver.3 shifts to inflatable plastic, foregrounding the formal and expressive potential of origami deconstruction — heat-bonded transparent PVC lies flat as a thin membrane in rest, and rises into a three-dimensional fan when inflated. The ongoing Ver.4 builds on this with AI collaboration: LLMs are used for conceptual ideation and brainstorming, while a multi-platform AIGC workflow (visual generation, code generation, interactive prototyping) jointly produces prototype iterations — yielding, at this stage, an interactive simulation site that lets visitors customize their own fan creases. AI here does not replace design judgment; it carries out the rapid rehearsal that follows the designer's direction