Noah Toyonaga

Geometry, biology, architecture, and fashion may seem like wildly disparate fields, but they all find a meeting place in the Harvard Horizons project of PhD physics student Noah Toyonaga—not unlike the shape that lies at the center of their research.  

In "Scissors Across Scales," Toyonaga, who uses they/them pronouns, explores the familiar mechanism of the “two-bar linkage” across different areas of knowledge and creativity—not actual scissors, but a geometric motif featuring two bars connected at a central pivot point that facilitates a shearing motion. Through study and imagination, Toyonaga takes a simple shape and envisions new applications for it in the shelters we build and even the clothes we wear.   

Toyonaga works with what is essentially a lattice of scissors, connected from handles to tips. An everyday example is a bathroom mirror with an extendible metal arm that uses a one-dimensional lattice. Toyonaga’s lattices are two-dimensional, featuring scissors connected horizontally and vertically, allowing them to expand and contract on multiple planes. “To me, this set of projects is really beautiful and interesting, because they show the breadth you can get from really simple geometric ideas—this pair of scissors is so elementary,” they say. 

Toyonaga initially encountered the scissors motif in a microbiological contractile injection system—essentially a mechanical spring that viruses and bacteria use to infect their hosts. From there, they developed a set of algorithms to create various new shapes by altering the length of the connecting legs. What resulted was an entirely new class of meta-material, similar to origami or kirigami (the traditional Japanese art of cutting and folding paper), that uses pivot points instead of folds to create new structures. Such structures retain their ability to transform between one-dimensional and three-dimensional, creating possibilities for transportable architectures, such as emergency shelters or moveable hospitals.  

Toyonaga has also observed the scissors lattice in the crisscrossing warp and weft fibers in woven fabric. Fascinated by how fabrics wrap around bodies and when and how wrinkles are created, they now explore applications in areas that draw on traditional weaving patterns, such as haute couture and carbon fiber patterning, the latter of which is used in objects as diverse as fishing rods and spacecraft. Clothing presents what Toyonaga calls “a wonderfully complicated problem” of geometry: How to make a garment that fits well. To answer that question, they received funding to design a collection that uses the scissors mechanism. 

Toyonaga plans to publish their research—including the code behind the algorithm they developed—so that others can better understand and work with it themselves. But they say they don’t expect most people to be interested in that kind of exploration. They have a much simpler aspiration for the impact of their ideas moving forward.   

“I do hope that people will interact with the garment I’ll be making over the next year,” they say. “I want them to see it and think, ‘That’s kind of fun!’ To me, that’s total success; someone paused and for a second saw the wonder in something mundane.”