L'Accordion

Unfold radiance, enfold ambience.

Company

GT BSID

My Role

Industrial Designer

Tools

Illustrator · Fusion · Arduino

Timeline

Feb 2023 - Apr 2023

Description

An origami lamp fusing convenience of smart home and joy of physical interaction.

Context

Winner of 2023 LIT Lighting Design Award. Flipping light switches ties to ritual moments in life: focus, recollect, relax… Smart home tech brings versatility and convenience, but loses the sensual interaction. L’Accordion seeks to condense the daily odyssey into a desktop lighting experience. By moving the handle, the user adjusts the lamp’s brightness along its physical span, bringing the perfect glow for any given moment.

An arm pulling the handle of the lit L’Accordion lamp, its folded white shade extended across a workbench beside an open magazine and a laptop

Inspiration

A four-image mood board: a dancer in motion blur, hands throwing a pot, hanging paper cranes, and a red pagoda roof

To celebrate physicality, I observed activities centered around body movements and existing objects associated with motions. Craft was another field of exploration for understanding sensuality in tangible items. Since the project implied the process of condensation, I looked into origami and architecture for both ends of the spectrum.

Concept Development

Concept sketches of lamp forms including fans, cones and stacked folds, beside a larger diagram of a shade folding flat with an arrow showing the collapse, marked with a gold asterisk, and a photograph of gold paper folded in a Miura pattern.

Postmodernist approaches dominated the ideation for this project. I borrowed from existing icons with motion associated with them already. Playing with their form, materials, scale, and interaction gave me many ideas. After I landed on the final concept, the Miura fold stood out as the perfect structure for adding dimensionality to the original unidirectional valleys and mountains.

Construction

Four build photographs: an LED strip on the acrylic base, the circuit board and slide potentiometer, a laser cutter scoring folds, and the scissor mechanism

Diffuser: Mylar

Mylar was chosen for its excellent ability to diffuse light and for its suitability to laser cutting, making accurate Miura patterns possible.


Scissor Extension: Acrylic

When designing lights, one must take shadows into consideration. Acrylic wins over metal, for it keeps the internal self-shadow minimal.


Electronics: Slide Pot

A Feather board and NeoPixels provided control and light. A slide pot, mounted to the scissors at two points, tracked the exact span of the light.

An arm pulling the handle of the lit L’Accordion lamp, its folded white shade extended across a workbench beside an open magazine and a laptop
Close-up of the lamp’s wooden handle and clear acrylic scissor mechanism at the top corner of the folded, lit shade
A person seated at a workbench holding the lamp’s handle with the shade partly compressed, sketches and sticky notes on the table beside a laptop
The lit L’Accordion lamp on a workbench with its folded shade fully extended between two wooden posts. In the foreground, a person seen from behind holds a pen over sketch sheets labeled The Pill and The Temple, with sticky notes and an open laptop beside them.

Credit


Special Thanks

Steve Chininis