Industrial Design| Discursive Design
This project is a vacuum formed desk lamp that describes a slow decline of one's personal motivation. It is an undergrad academic solo project that serves as a conversational starter piece where through time and as the lamp is used, its batteries slowly deplete, making the flames burn less brighter with every usage and as time passes by.
The project called to design a lamp that would represent oneself with a word that starts with a letter chosen at random for the whole class.
The letter ‘J’ was assigned to me and I immediately thought of the word ‘Jaded’ as being appropriate to describe how I felt at the time in my second year of university, after a very challenging first year of transitioning to a design program without any art or design background.
The concept was derived from blocks of wood thrown into a flame similar to a small campfire. This brought a sense of being organic despite the form being very geometric and block-y.
I thought of burning wood slowly losing its flame as a metaphor for the burning feeling of a self-drive that acted as a motivator for myself entering university. Through all the early tribulations of the program, however, this flame in me grew smaller and smaller with every passing disappointment in my works.
I wanted to emulate this visual into a conversation starter desk lamp in order for people to sit around it similar to a camp fire and have open conversations on the stigmatized feeling of burnout and losing motivation, especially for young Filipinos in a competitive academic environment.
Three types of wooden blocks were selected to be used. They were then marked, cut, and carved to emulate parts of them burnt off. High Impact Polystyrene (HIPS) plastic sheets were used to vacuum form the wooden molds. The class was oriented by the people from Vaquform on how to use their desktop thermoforming device and the best practices involved in designing objects to be made with such process.
Instead of making a mold and then making a base of the lamp separately like most others in the class, I opted to have the wooden blocks used as molds be made into the lamp's base, carving out the excess parts that were vacuum formed and affixing grooves to hold the formed plastic through a snug fit.
This was to make each block unique and concentrate on the tedious nature of the project from start to finish in order to put an emphasis on the effort and learnings involved in the design of an object which could easily be overlooked and dismissed which causes a demotivation in a student designer.
I ran into several instances redoing the electrical components of the lamp. The LED lights I was initially using kept burning out after some time of use, possibly due to improper calculations of their combined voltage—evidencing my inexperience at the time. In the end, I opted using an LED strip instead of individual lights to be attached onto the wooden blocks. This, however, provided another challenge.
With the LED strips taking up much more space than the single LED light to be attached to the front of each wooden block, containing the LED strips in the vacuum formed HIPS covers was challenging as most of the time the dots from the LED strips would become very visible on the outside due to being too close to the HIPS cover. It didn’t look natural at all and was obvious to the viewer to be artificial.
After some adjustments, I finally got to a configuration of the LED strips inside the HIPS cover that looked more natural for the brief.
This was my first project in my second year of university studying Industrial Design. As someone with no design background before entering university, I found it extremely challenging to do a lot of technically and skill-based activities in my studies, to the point of burning out easily.
This was the very first work I’ve done that was called “beautiful”. I have never thought of my designs as visually pleasing as I initially focused on feasibility and usability in my initial intake in university. This project, however, proved to me that I could still accomplish all of that even while exercising my creativity to the point of making something worthwhile that other people not only will be able to use, but enjoy.
© Erik Asia 2024