ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the work that novices do in order to follow written origami instructions. The aim of the origami is to create beautiful, new, original models. Written instructions are a way of documenting constructions and teaching origami. Usually origami is taught without them: an instructor will demonstrate a construction while students fold the model at the same time. The chapter describes some of the lived-work of following the instructions for making the swan. It focuses on the "embodied coordinatization" of a developing origami model. The chapter provides a different context for examining these same materials. When people first look at the swan instructions, they treat them as if they were something like a mathematical proof. A "gestalt" is an object seen as a totality: its details are seen as features of the object that those details simultaneously exhibit.
