LOUE - The Lamp Of Unambiguous Emotion

Finally, this picture encapsulates the various prototypes built during the process of creating LOUE. Feel free to ask if you want me to elaborate on comment on any of the details of its creation. :D

Making the functional prototype I tried to build it as quickly as possible with what I had eliminating cost prizes, waiting time for delivery, and feeling great as it's also an environmental choice. The prototype was built at the fabrication lab at my university at DTU (Technical University of Denmark - Design Build Lab). I used the leftover scrab piece of plywood as well as scrab acrylic pieces once again as an environmental choice.

The lamp inside is made from a battery-connected LED stripe which I had at home. This piece, ordered from amazon, was once used in another project but given new life in this one.

I wrapped it around and glued it to a cardboard container I had making it light evenly 360 degrees. with the battery pack at the bottom.

I glued its engagements buttons at the top making them accessible from my own wooden made buttons in the casing.

As seen on this picture the box was cut from scrap pieces of plywood lying in the workshop.

Finally, all parts were glued together using clamps to make sure the casing was held in place as the glue dried.

In between wooden joints i used wood glue however between surfaces of wood to plastic like the ones between the wooden buttons at the top and the lightning contraption underneath I used a gluegun.

At a relatively early stage in the project, I made CAD models and renders. This was done in order for me to send high-quality pictures of the concept to my colleagues to get feedback on how they thought it should look like. Due to the concept's simple box shape, this was a super quick make. I have added the CAD models for download as Solidworks files under files.

I could easily change the appearance of the hexagonal geometry to get a feeling of what it might look like once the lamp was shining in different colors.

Finally, I made a render and made annotations for me to share with the rest of my team the different components of the lamp.

After having decided on the box-like shape I decided to make different models from cardboard. This was done in order for me to get a sense of the size of the box that came to be LOUE. I find that making boxes from cardboard is very effective as the fabrication is super simple and quick.

I'm bending pieces of cardboard into triangular shapes and gluing them inside my model to make it more steady.

First, I built this 20 cm^3 box as that at first seemed perfect in my mind. However, after building it. And seeing it in relation to what else was on my working desk I saw that it was way too big!

Thus I proceeded to build a new box 15 cm^3. This was even better but however still to big as it didn't seem right in my relation to my hands.

Finally, I built this small 10 cm^3 box. That size was much better in relation to my hand. However, this felt too small to be visible in the context of a real office environment where things move quickly. I wanted it to be more noticeable. Thus in the workshop when I built LOUE I made it 12.5 cm^3 the perfect size lying between the sizes of my second and third cardboard model. 

With our research in Kintsugi Design, we knew we wanted to build some kind of communication device.  It was important to us that this device was a tangible 3-dimensional object as we wanted it to be present on a work desk always throughout the workday of an employee. We had the idea that we could use light to communicate different emotions. Thus it was decided that I should draw different concepts of what that might look like.

I drew different shapes and proportions of lamps. This was all done in an orthogonal view like what is seen on the underlying photo. The orthogonal view simplifies the drawing while still enabling clear visualization of the concept's shapes. This is advantageous since the drawings here are used as a process to come up with ideas and thus being able to get ideas more quickly.

Initially, I thought our communication device would be round but then I started to draw boxes...

I When i drew the boxes it made me think of the advantageous possibilities of laser cutting the lamps casing as well as the similarities with bees way of working thus the hexagons.