Improved cardboard shipping boxes.
If I can make the shipping boxes less fragile with same amount of paper as current cardboard box designs, it is a win.
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Note that boxes may get pressure from all the sides(different kind of pressure & movements during shipping), not just from the top as seen in the images (or shelters) in the article.
I think the goal would be not to make the whole box out of this structure, but to scale this structure down to be 4 millimeters high and use is as the core of the cardboard (or corrugated fibreboard as it's known in the industry).
No origami can withstand the force of a UPS delivery person.
I loaded semis for UPS in the summer of 1967 in Milwaukee, between my first and second years of college. I worked 4 hour shifts at night, 6-10 pm, M-F. Hard job. Paid very well. Deep inside the trucks the temperature and humidity were so high me and my partner had to shift roles every 15 minutes, one of us outside the back of the truck selecting packages off the belt that ran along the back of all the trucks in the loading bay and the other inside the truck, pulling them off the long elevated metal roller-topped structure that extended from the back belt at the back of the truck to the front of the semi.
When the outside temperature was 90° and up, it was insanely hot 30 feet deep inside the trucks with no air circulation: we wore gloves and shorts. The noise also was incredibly loud, deafening. Toward the end of our shifts we were semi-delirious and exhausted and so we just threw the rapidly incoming packages over our heads back into the truck instead of stacking them as was proper.
So the damage was likely done long before the delivery person took it the last few feet.
Anyone who’s worked inside the sortation centers has also seen sorters crash and rip packages to shreds.
Obviously that’s not “normal” damage to packages, because those things certainly aren’t getting delivered, but it’s not like these things get handled gently by the automation. Packages slide into collection belts where they land hard on top of other packages, they zip down chutes to be loaded into semis, etc.
There’s a reason they want breakables properly packed, and it’s not because the last-mile delivery guy is going to shoot a three with your box.
Some science right there
May be we'll get something like cardboard egg cartons which are designed for vertical loads but for other types of goods.