ATEC-FAB UTDallas

 Chanlyr Jordan: Lamp Project

 

Concept

            My thought process going into designing this lamp was to create one suitable for reading next to, so it should emit a small amount of light while still being fun to have on display. To do this, I've returned to my old buddy Kurt Vonnegut for inspiration. I decided on a lamp size proportional to that of a hardcover book; a literal book light. I studied a variety of Vonnegut's book covers from over the decades, and picked the design elements that I liked the most from a few of my favorite ones. Because of its form factor, the lamp became my own Frankenstein covers for The Sirens of Titan and Breakfast of Champions. On the sides, I adorned the lamp with imagery from each book. On the BofC side, I've chosen doodles from Vonnegut that are littered throughout the book. For the alternate side, I chose more in-depth greyscale adaptations of some important imagery from the book.

Techniques

 

            The techniques I employed to make this vision come to fruition were very simple. For the laser cut composition, I image traced the design elements that I had chosen in Illustrator, arranged them, and formatted them for laser cutting (pictured above). I decided that the light should primarily come from the text, so I gave the front and back texts a blue stroke. This applied to some portions of the side images as well, to make them pop. These are going to be the only parts of the lamp that are cut-through, for a small amount of light and some tasteful highlights.

The meat of my design lies in raster engravings, so I converted everything I wanted to engrave to greyscale to get a good tonal range across the whole lamp. Once I had the vectored curves, I imported the outer and inner cuts into Rhino to create a render. To do this, I extruded the outer cuts separately from the inner cut outlines of the letters and side portions. Once each was extruded, I used BooleanDifference to subtract the inner shapes from the large slabs of digital material. Rhino doesn't handle engravings well, so I captured viewport renders of each side of the lamp while it was "assembled" and laid the engravings over them in Photoshop (pictured below). 

Also represented in this illustration is the different colors of light that I imagine I'll achieve via colored paper inserts or acrylic.

Materials

           The materials I'll laser cut this lamp out of are 5.5mm plywood underlayment. It's fairly cheap, and I've heard that it burns well. For the light, I'll use a smaller candelabra bulb and the matching socket and cord to affix to the bottom of my lamp. For assembly, I'll use CA glue, hopes, and dreams.