Ilumina LED Desk Lamp (Wi-Fi Connected)

Background

I provided the design and fabrication for this project while working at Shapeable, a prototyping and engineering consultancy. My role also included influencing the interaction design aspect of the lamp’s functionality and the connected application. The project can be seen on Shapeable’s website here.

Goal

The idea behind Ilumina was to create a low consumption and connected lamp. The prototype had to be robust enough for testing in real life office environments, yet aesthetic enough to entice users to try it out.

Design

For the prototype, we wanted to create a crafted and elegantly simple design and so we used wood for the body. To allow for an easily produced, accurate, and repeatable design, we chose to create the lamp out of a series of laser cut wooden panels fastened together. By fastening a series of panels together, we could hide all the electronics and cabling inside, which reinforced the simple design.

Fabrication

Testing

Rather than iterating in a vacuum, we shared the Ilumina prototype with numerous users and received feedback on usability, brightness, application functionality, and design. Overall, we found that people were very receptive to the customization the lamp offered and suggested we incorporate some additional playful functionality in order to make it more of a social device.