Foldify was created by Warsaw, Poland-based Pixle, a trio of two designers and an engineer. The app is for the iPad only right now, and it will cost $1.99 on launch, but will be priced higher later. The concept is pretty basic: use the iPad to create digital papercraft art that can be broadly customized with colors, facial features, designs and more, and then quickly printed out, cut and folded to make paper creatures or objects.

Finished Foldify art

It’s very simple, but Pixle is not targeting kids — though they are going to be adding blank outlines that can be printed for young children to color them in with crayons or pencils. They want it to be for “everyone,” said Krzysztof Zabłocki, Pixle’s engineer. “I think we kind of made it that way — it’s easy to use but you don’t need drawing skills.”

The iPad is an unexpected platform for making things with paper, but Zabłocki says it’s actually the ideal kind of way to create something.

“The problem with creating content on the iPad is it’s not as good as your PC for most usages, like for productivity and stuff like that, I still find my Mac more useful,” he said. “But for something really creative, with a bit of fun, I prefer to be able to zoom in, zoom out, move some stuff. It really feels more natural. We tried to prove that quite a bit with Foldify.”

It’s natural because your finger is always your brush — there’s no complicated set of tools to select from. Instead of picking a brush size, you simply zoom in or out for more level of detail. Using just your finger to create something is much more immediate and engaging than a tool or utensil — it’s likely why kids take so quickly to touchscreen tablets. And that is what I think makes this app so wonderful and accessible. I would not pick up a papercraft kit at my local art store. But did I download the app on a whim while sitting on my couch? Yep. And to confirm Zablocki’s claim, it is very simple to use. There’s a menu of colors, patterns, facial features and accessories, as well as a color wheel with which you can decorate your object.

Foldify is the second app from Pixle, which is made up of Zablocki, and Mariusz Ostrowski and Renata Ostrowska, a husband and wife team of user interface and user experience designers. They strive for very simple, easy to use mobile apps. ”We really wanted to create something fresh. We saw papercraft and said that would be a great idea,” Zablocki said. “No one ever did that on mobile before.”

But it’s a decent bet that as the idea of 3D printers and the maker movement continue to catch on, coupled with simpler, cheaper examples of using tech to make art like Folidfy, more developers and artists will be encouraged to further explore how physical art can come from the devices we use every day.

Updated to note that the app’s introductory price will be $1.99.

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Now one of the creators of that brilliant bunny, Olivier Mével, is back with a new spin on the same idea — and a Kickstarter project to get it made.

The scheme, called ReaDIYmate, is essentially Internet-friendly papercraft. You put a little toy together with a few origami folds, hook it up to a web bridge and tell it what you want them to do.

Right now the system’s reactions are limited: your little chum can move around or play a song whenever a trigger event takes place on the Internet. The system has access to a variety of web service APIs so \ it can react to a range of things — when you get a like on Facebook, for example, or when a particular user sends you a message in Gmail. Other services already hooked up include Twitter, Foursquare and If This, Then That — which can potentially act as a bridge to a wider number of sites.

Mével and his team in Paris — working under the banner of “The People’s Republic of Interactive Things — have been working on ReaDIYmate for some time, and since launching quietly at the end of last week they’re already more than a quarter of the way to their $25,000 goal.

The ReaDIYmate is not cheap (you have to pledge at least $100 to get any mechanical parts) but then again Kickstarter is not just about pre-ordering: it’s about buying into an idea. And these little guys are fun. Just watch how you can control one using an iPhone.

Mével says that ReaDIYmate is a build-it-yourself product that can be constructed in 10 minutes, but is expandable and enhanceable for anybody who wants to take it further.

“We believe it’s very important to have an approach where you end up with something cool and satisfactory very rapidly that serves as a starting point to create your own,” he told me by email. “Depending on your skill, your expertise or the time you want to spend, you can create a new form or change what the object does.”

“Our dream is to enable everyone to build interactive objects connected to the web,” he adds. “We are used to User Generated Content. We think that now is the time for User Generated Things.”

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