Intial Research
How can we make spaces without access to natural light livable, comfortable, and more desirable?
Older appartment buildings in urban environments frequently have rooms with one window that have little access to the sun.
Humans evolved to look at warm tone sunlight, resulting in
Lower Blood Pressure
Increased Seratonin Regulation
Large Reduction in eye strain
Improvements in quality of sleep
Reduced risk of dementia
User Profile
Design concious urban dweller, likely higher income working in a creative proffession
Lives in old construction appartment building as a permanent space, not transient
Sacrificed natural light in exchange for the appartments neighborhood
Older building has lack of outlets
Ideation
I was inspired by industrial honesty as a way to highlight the technical complexity of the lamp internals
Originally, I was interested in organic curtain like forms to serve as a representation of a window
design a wall-mounted, battery powered lamp which recreates the positive effects of a window.
Sunlight Specs
To recreate golden hour, I would need to achieve the following
a temperture of approximently 2800K
a color rendering index of 100
an angle of 22.5 degrees
parallel, laminated, light rays
Initial cad model to get sense of scale, no component on final cad model was repeated
Building
and
Assembly
When calculating the angle of reflectance from the mirror, I unknowingly flipped the sign of the negative tilt coming from the lens, resulting in light being projected upwards, not towards the floor.
Luckily, by simply inverting the lamp, the light was directed correctly, and a once top heavy design now looked grounded. This orientation was then used for my final design
Final CAD Build
The heatsink was milled to have threaded cutouts,
M3 threaded rods were cut and chamfered to size,
Lens assembly was assembled
Final Renders
All renders done in Keyshot
Solutions
2800K 1000 Lumen COB LED with
a color rendering index of 98
a mirror tilt of 15 degrees, and a lens tilt of 1.25 degrees to create projecting angle of 22.5
Fresnel lens laminates diverging rays to make shadows crisp
As I kept sketching and refining the internals though,
I made the decision to celebrate the electronics, shifting the project to an industrial aesthetic
Learning moments from Prototype
3 different tolerances for the battery compartment and cap before the perfect fit was honed in.
Flexible conduit was cut to size,
Final assembly
CAD Development
PMMA Cast plexiglass was laser cut,
flame polished and buffed using toothpaste
Final Images
More advanced model, testing a wavy front geometry versus the rectangular shape I decided upon.
Internals and CMF were also further refined past this model.
Rendered in keyshot
