Shelandy Ting: Lamp

I have been amused by Jim Sanborn's  "A,A" for some time, and like to make a similar light installation art to project the lovely Chinese calligraphy font onto the environment I have been living.

With this goal in mind, when designing my own lamp, I intent to reserve the wall on the top and some space on the side walls to put few Chinese characters.  Since the Chinese calligraphy fonts already have quite a complexity, I decide make the external contour of the lamp to be simple, yet with elegance in an asymmetric outlook inside a symmetric structure.  So it will show some modern fusion feeling.  Since the major impression of the rib of the lamp will be in a simplistic style, one way to add more fun on top of it without overkilling it by making the expression too heavy, is to add a light-weighted twist of 'texture' in the 3D structure.  The question is: How can we add a 'texture', which is mostly expressed in 2D pattern, on a 3D structure without occlude the shape of original structure?  I spent some time in searching the possible technology of using laser cut on wood crafting, and found a way called "living hinge" to make the hard surface bendable.  So I am using this lamp design to further exercise my skill of fusing 2D and 3D feeling in an installation art.  None of the living hinge pattern on internet is suitable for my demand of twist, so I create my own.  

I use Rhino to draw the contour of ridge,  and use the "arraypolar"command to place the ribs onto the desired locations.   To make the interesting asymmetric outlook, I use boolean difference to cut out the top of a big sphere from the button from a particular angle.   A primitive preview of the structure will look like this:

I wish to make the button skirt higher to reveal more sweep above the hemline.  However, I also like to make the ribs twisted for 90 degree in the real assembling process.  (That is the reason that the slots on the top did not align to the center of circle in this design preview.) In the early design phase I did a test on a hardboard stripe and it can hardly bent that much if shorter than 15cm.  I also have to limit the length of ribs length in order to not to have a huge lamp.  This physical constraint for using hardboard as the material is something  I have to compromised.   After getting the first cut, I realized a way to avoid this problem, I will make the change in the next revision.     

One thing we can see from this picture above is that the Rhino script of cutting the intersection slots may not work well in some cases.  Since I knew I am going to be bold to try some things  in the design beyond what we can reply on Rhino, so I did not bother to fix all 2D laser cut layout design all in the 3D view of Rhino.   I start with the 3D model in Rhino as much as possible, then clean up the problem in 2D view in Rhino which gives me more clear and precise control for laser cut.  After that, I alter the 2D layout again for those parts which the 2D shapes needed to be adjusted for constructing the 3D structure which can not simply constructed/ simulated  by Rhino.  One thing I am going to try is make two different twisting structures in the final result, but no one knows how exactly the material I am going to used will be twisted  with a particular setting of  material/ spacial configuration.  so the lesson learned here is

Make your design as detail as possible, then allowing trial and error to find the best combination. 

The interior shape of the circular disk is further limited to support only two goals:

• support the part of the bulb fixture, 
• make the light projection through the mask as much as it can be

The circular disk on top is for the calligraphy mask, the disk in the middle is designed in the way 
the hollow shape will let the light coming from the bulb underneath go through the mask as much as possible.  A transparent material might be better, but its not viable for now since lots of designers are competing one laser cutter.

This is the layout sheet for my first cut, which I put two designs on it.  The one without twist ribs, and another one without complete lamp construction but the major part of the twist ribs 

After the first assembling the result of  the first cut, the twist of live hinge does add a tasteful fun on top of the basic contour.   However, the effect of the light mask is not too obviously.   It will take a while to find the right bulb and redesign the focal length from the bulb to the mask.  So I temporarily drop the idea of having Chinese character light shadow project, and scale the Chinese character down as the decoration on top disk so I can make more slots to accommodate more living hinge twists to flourish the top of lamp.   I also make the slots on the disk rotate to certain degree, hoping the result of connecting the joins is better.  Again, this is a somewhat trial and error process because the degree of individual rotation is hard to calculate, the only way is to estimate and make a prototype to test if the estimation works or not.

Since the final spacial structure is way different than the 3D rendering can make.  I did not make a Keyshot rendering for it this time because it is will be a total misleading.  I will add a photo of the assembled lamp once I get the second cut, which is delayed because the assistant of fab delayed my first submission which has lots of  living hinge which taking too much time for them to cut.    Before that, this is what the close thing I can get to render the idea:

Because the fab could not give me all 16 living hinges I need, I teared down the living hinge and took the shot of the lamp.  I will add another picture once I got enough living hinge to finish the real composition

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Adding the shot of the construction with only few living hinges