LASER CUT LIGHT
Initial Thoughts & Concept
The idea of creating a light/lamp was very exciting and I had accidently already started coming up with ideas within the previous assignment. One concept that really stuck out to me and I would have loved to produce was a martini glass lamp, particularly coming up with the concept to create a small dish at the bottom for jewellery lovers like myself to place the daily pisces they wear in. I created a few concept sketches, a very quick and lopsided model and a mood board before taking a closer look at the brief and understanding they wanted a light source created out of abstract forms. Whoops. I decided to include this work to show a bit of my thought processes but also I just think it's a really cool idea and would like to continue to work on it in the future.
Generating Ideas
My actual lamp started by gathering images of old vintage lampshades all our grandmothers owned as well as images of fluorescent jellyfish. Partially I took inspiration from the jellyfish as their free flowing shape and movement really allowed me to loosen up my designs since I tend to think and design very literal or surreal then abstract.
I looked into specifically laser cut lamps/lighting but found none that portrayed my exact image I wanted, even the ones based on jellyfish felt a little too structural. But these are ones I did feel drawn to.
Concept Sketches
The sketching process was a way to try and combine my two ideas together partIcularly in the upper/body portion of my light. I played around a lot with the idea of adding a few structural tentacles at the bottom to help blend with the bottom but ultimately decided that it caused the light to lose a lot of its movement and drift away from the vintage lampshade feel.
Prototyping Begins
This one was just out of cardboard and cut out with kitchen scissors but I was very happy with the main shape and body of this prototype. I mainly used this prototype to simply get an idea if the lamp would look aesthetically pleasing and how all the shapes would fit together. I wish I had focused more on the functionality as many very simple and fixable errors came up within the second prototype that could have easily been avoided.
Next I moved on to teaching myself adobe illustrator and creating a digital second prototype.
My regard to function was very much shown and proved during this second prototype with many issues arising. First big one was that my measurements and proportions were completely off. After creating the smaller circle I just copied and enlarged it causing the slots to be way too large and needed tissue and large amounts of super glue to hold the pieces together. Second was only adding slots to the circles, adding them to the other pieces as well helped them fit together securely. The Third was an extremely silly one. I forgot to add a second hole for the tentacle-like pieces, meaning they couldn’t all join together. On this same theme I added little cut outs for the tentacles to hang off at the bottom as well as two at the top for the lamp itself to hang. Finally I reorganised all the pieces within the drawing to maximise the use of my material. I also Had a few issues with the laser not cutting through all my material making it hard to pop out so I had to remember to up the settings a little bit.
My Final Design
Thoughts & Reflection
The whole design process was a very large learning process. A lot of mistakes were made but I enjoyed the challenge of creating the lamp. I am also very happy with how the light came out, looking back there was a few I would have liked to change such as more variety within the tentacle length and also moving them further out. I really liked how this design played with light especially when it moved and spun you could see the really unique spiral pattern it occurred. next time I would also work on making the lamp larger as it would have allowed me to use more LED's and create an even more effective light, I also had a decent amount of left over material I could have used for it but just needed to work on positioning within illustrator and then the laser cutter better. Overall I feel as if my design was a success and created a beautiful light fixture.
