Desktop lamp

This was an assignment in a course at Chalmers, where the challenge was to design a lamp, choosing materials and suitable manufacturing techniques.

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed working with wood. When I was little, you would either find me in the garage working on some project, or out in the forest building treehouses. In this project, I wanted to use wood as material and learn about a manufacturing technique called steam bending.

The context

The lamp was designed to be used in the context of a home office, meaning it should be usable both during and after working hours. The different lights in the room were mapped out.

Concept development using the Fish Trap Model

I started off by sketching simple concepts, and chose a few to develop further. The “Fish Trap Model” helps to structure the ideas and as moving on the sketches and concepts will become more and more refined.

The glare issue

If your eyes are exposed to a bright light, you will become tired. I wanted to test this before moving on so I created some paper prototypes to see if there was any potential glare issue.

The placement of the led-strip, the height of the lamp and the width of the material had to be considered to avoid creating annoyed eyes.

Learning by doing

It was not mandatory to actually build a lamp, but I wanted to try and see if it would be possible to create the shape I had sketched out (and I desperately needed a lamp for my desk).

Unfortunately I did not have access to the specific type of wood I had chosen, ash, but I could get hold of some balsa wood. Balsa wood turned out to be very resistant to heat, so my attempts to use steam bending for this prototype failed.

After some trial and error I managed to bend the balsa wood, and the final concept could be equipped with the led strip, creating an almost finished product. It is still a prototype and I will have to do some more tests and refinements to develop it further.