Lamp Design
Designing, prototyping, coding and building a lamp
Project Snapshot
01
Team & Timeline
September – November 2020
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Role: Designer, Product Design, Electronics
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Team: Solo academic work, Integrated Design and Management Program (with a lot of encouragement and support from my dad, Shawn)
02
Problem
Designing, prototyping, coding, and building a lamp is a core project in the Integrated Design and Management Program at MIT. The project challenges students to employ the manufacturing tools, practices and theories learned in our IDM workshop sessions to gain hands-on experience in product development by working through all phases of the design process.
To meet project deliverables, each lamp had to incorporate:
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LED lighting controlled by a microprocessor (Arduino or similar).
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CAD design of at least one component
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3D printing and/or CNC machining of at least one component
03
Overview
This was my first time designing a physical product, and through this assignment, I sought to learn how to manipulate different materials, use Arduino microprocessors and effectively control light with a touch sensor. I also wanted to be creative and work with recycled materials to reduce my environmental footprint.
04
Outcome & Impact
After many many hours and many failures along the way, the final outcome was a working, beautiful and durable lamp that I showcased on Lamp Demo Day.
How I Got There
Materials
As wood and other material prices were soaring in the pandemic, I wanted to focus on upcycling materials for this lamp. I used discarded #6 plastic for the petals, a donated piece of leftover walnut for the base and receptacle, a soft copper pipe for the stem, and a brass shoulder reducer to attach the flower head to the stem.
Once the #6 plastic was cut into petals, I colored it using charcoal pastels before shrinking the petals in my oven using the slumping process (similar to how polystyrene is used in Shrinky Dinks kits). I then painted a UV resin over both sides to prevent color transfer.
The result was not only environmentally friendly but beautiful.
I used two pieces of recycled walnut leftover in our studio to construct the base of my lamp and the receptacle. I used CAD and CAM to machine the base using a CNC milling machine.
I designed the receptacle as a hollow hexagonal pyramid to hold the petals. For this piece, I cut my block of walnut into thin layers and put the layers (hot glued to a larger piece of wood) through the thickness sander to ensure identical thickness. I then marked each four-sided piece and cut them out using the bandsaw. I created a jig to help guide the compound miter angles and cut bevels along the edges of each piece to make them smoothly fit together. I used wood glue to secure the pieces together and a brass shoulder reducer to connect the receptacle and stem.
05
Process
While I was initially fascinated by mechanical tulip lamp designs I found online in my discovery phase, I kept returning to vintage Tiffany lamps. I loved the stained glass look of the petals and wanted to explore recreating these petals out of different materials. Prototyping and sketching were crucial to the design of this lamp, as I didn't want to waste materials. I relied heavily on paper prototypes for the shade in particular and on the wisdom and encouragement of my dad who helped keep me sane throughout every step of this process.
Electronics
The lamp's electronics included an Adafruit neopixel ring, an Arduino nano microprocessor, and an Adafruit capacitive touch sensor. I wired and coded the adafruit neopixel ring, which fit into the inside of the receptacle and fed the wires down the copper pipe, which were soldered to a PCB board in the base of the lamp. The original intention was to have the touch sensor housed under the wooden base; however, due to last-minute challenges the evening before the due date, I had to keep the touch sensor outside of the base. Note to self: test early and often! The lamp was programmed to switch between different sunset hues with each touch and flicker like fireflies in the setting sun.
