Mary Effler - Assignment 6 - Lamp

I started on this project before I've designed my waffle project because honestly, I'm having a really hard time finding inspiration for a waffle design. I'm not very good with just random abstract shapes, but it's difficult for me to think of a design that would work well with the waffle structure.
At first I was drawing up some designs for a Deep Space Nine based lamp, but I wasn't liking my attempted designs, and also, the light I would up getting from Home Depot isn't a hanging light, so it wouldn't have worked with the light I was able to get from there.

The light I would up getting is a little battery-powered puck light:

So after struggling with that for a while, I finally changed the idea and wanted to make a more basic design, since the whole point of a lamp is letting light though, and in this case, letting light through in an interesting pattern or shape. I was thinking of some of the children's lamps you normally see:


I started off with a basic cylindrical shape, since that would accommodate the light I have a little better. After drawing several classier looking designs and not really liking many of them, I thought back to the children's designs, and tried to think of a more fun one that could be played with and made into different shapes once sliced. So I kept things simple and modeled a piece of candy with a wrapper on it:

Front view

Side view

For the waffling process, I don't have a lot of time between jobs and everything to always come into the ATEC labs, but a friend of mine showed me an Autodesk software called 123D Make, which will take 3D models and serial slice, waffle, and otherwise format them for laser cutting. So I threw the model into that program, and played with how many slices I wanted, where I wanted them to line up, etc. To see a more detailed process of the workflow in 123D Make, check out my posting on the waffle project, as that has more pictures showing the full process. 

Here's my final layout for the slices. Red slices do mean there could be structural concerns, but looking at the design, using some Loctite should fix and hold the areas that need to be kept together, so it won't be a problem in the end.

Then here's a rendering of what it will look like in cardboard when done.

I wanted to add a couple more elements, and make a space in the center of it for the puck light to sit. So I took the slices into Adobe Illustrator and cut out a rounded rectangle in the 3 middle pieces, then on the outside two pieces, added a random dot and star pattern so the light could cast interesting shapes, ala the childrens' lamps from above. After that I put the pieces into Rhino, and made sure the inner cuts lined up okay for the light, and that everything was ready to print:  

 

I've submitted the file for printing, but due to the backlog it's not quite ready yet. I'll be sure to post here when the design is finished. Until there, here are some keyshot renderings of it. I made it out of a blue plastic, as the style is reminiscent to me of Ikea lamps: somewhat cheap looking, but still classy. The keyshot renderings don't show the detail from the AI files either.