Monday, October 24, 2011

Tony + Defina's Contorting Concoction...Continued

In continuing our design we began to look at solving the issues we had in the first design phase as well as implement some new elements to improve the lamps structure, assembly and manipulation of light. The first thing we looked at was how to continue contorting our geometry to make it more complex and have an even greater effect on lighting and shading.


In doing so we established several more control pints along the ribbed structure, allowing us to push and pull these points to create a more complex form.


With this we achieved greater dynamics in our lighting conditions however the form was so complex that it was very difficult to assemble and would not allow for the spandex membrane to fit tightly over it.
The next step was addressing the cracking and breaking of the acrylic horizontal and vertical members during assembly. We decided to shorten the vertical members so there would be less stress on them and create a radius at the end of the notches as the straight edged notches seemed to be prone to cracking under pressure.

In addition to this we also included a tongue and groove component as to lock the vertical and horizontal members in place.

The radial edges of the notches and shortening of the vertical members worked well in that there was less cracking and breaking of the acrylic pieces, however the tongue and groove application did not work as planned and did not allow for the members to align properly.

This in addition with the very complex form did not allow us to fully construct this iteration of our lamp, but allowed us to understand what needed to be done in order for it to work properly.

We also decided to test an opaque acrylic for its strength and its emissive properties like the spandex before.

We found that the opaque acrylic was more snug and held better when form fitting one notch to the other, however it was more brittle and did not have the emissive qualities that we wanted our lamp to exude and have therefore decided to work only with the transparent acrylic.

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