ourruthcodingforcreative

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Final Product: “Lumenight”- A Visualisation of Light Pollution in the Wellington Region

“Lumenight” is a lampshade that aims to raise awareness to the amount of light pollution in the Wellington region, encouraging people to be more aware about their usage. The smallest circle represents the percentage of night sky untouched by light pollution.

It doesn’t require any bolts or screws to assemble and is battery run so that if it were to be mass produced it could be flat packed and easy to operate. 

Reflection:

The process when making “Lumenight” definitely could have been a bit more divergent - especially with the coding aspect. Circles definitely did express the data well but I wish I played around more with different shapes or at least tried to push the barcode experiment further. 

While I am happy with the final outcome I see that there is definitely room for improvement. The lasercutter didn’t have a preset for the thickness of my material so I had to use one that was closest to it. This made the engraving lighter than expected and if I had more time I would have experimented with a deeper engrave.

It was also very difficult to stick the polypropylene to the bamboo, most of the glues I used weren’t very effective. I would have liked to tidy this up better. If I had more time I would also have tried to find a way to make the battery pack more integrated with the lamp instead of just dangling outside (maybe a base that contains it).

Source Code:

import processing.pdf.*; boolean savePDF = false;

float[] pollution = {8.25, 57.02, 23.17, 10.38, 1.18};

void setup(){  background (255);  size(600,900); frameRate(1);

}

void draw() {  background (255);

  if(savePDF == true) {    beginRecord(PDF, "initial" + frameCount + ".pdf");  }

//Black - med - emboss  stroke(0, 0, 0, 255);  strokeWeight(0.1);  fill(0, 0, 0, 255);  for (int i = 0; i < pollution.length; i++) {   ellipse(random(90, width), height/2, pollution[i]*8, pollution[i]*8);    }

//Blue - big - engrave  pollution = sort(pollution); stroke(0, 0, 255); noFill();

 for (int i = 0; i < pollution.length; i++) {  ellipse(width/2, height/2, pollution[i]*15, pollution[i]*15);  }

//red - small - cut   stroke(255, 0, 0);   noFill();   for (int i = 0; i < pollution.length; i++) {    ellipse(random(100,width), height/2, pollution[i]*5, pollution[i]*5);    }

//border white fill(255); noStroke(); rect(0, 0, 50, height/2 + 20); rect(width - 50, height/2 - 20, 60, height/2);  

//slits stroke(235, 64, 52); rect(width/2 - 20, 30, 50, 5); rect(width/2 - 20, height - 35, 50, 5); rect(30, 0, 10, height/2 + 5); rect(width - 40, height/2, 10, height/2);

//Border  stroke(255, 0, 0);  noFill(); rect(0, 0, width, height);

 if(savePDF == true) {    endRecord();  } }

void mousePressed() {  savePDF = true; }

void mouseReleased() {  savePDF = false; }

Final Images:

Entourage Images:

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Alternate Light Settings

I didn’t realise when I bought it but one of the sets of fairy lights I bought actually has a second setting of subtle flickering that works well decoratively.

(please don’t listen with sound I think we’re laughing very loudly)

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Assembling of Final Product

The initial reason for having the slits was so that this product could be flat packed and assembled easily. The last slit was pretty difficult to do but thankfully because bamboo is a pretty flexible material I was able to put it together without breaking it. The tops and bottoms were also very easy to slip in. 

I chose to hand cut the polyprop instead of lasercutting because the burn marks would be prominent against the white material. However, one thing that did make it a bit difficult was the polypropylene not sticking to the bamboo. After getting all the sides together I attempted to glue the polyprop more. The wire was also pushing on the sides so I cut out the corner so it could fit out. Ideally, there would have been a hole on the side for the wire but I didn’t realise this before lasercutting.

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Testing with Light Source: Bamboo Plywood Sheet with Polypropylene

40 fairylights a bit too dim so I might buy another set of lights so that you can actually have light come through

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Adding a Border Around Slits

The white border was done with processing but I will need to do the red lines to finish the circle in illustrator

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Problems with Further Developments

With this output I used a thinner piece of bamboo plywood and lasercut the pattern onto 4 different rectangles and tried to assemble them by slotting them into a cuboid shape. 

Things that are working:

the grain of the wood as a really nice texture to the product

embossing also helped with variety

the cuboid shape feels more interesting

Things that aren’t working:

I accidentally set a line that I was meant to cut as emboss and that took too much time on the lasercutter

some of the cut circles interfered with the slits and some of the slits fell off

Solutions:

put a white border around the slits so it wouldn’t cut

however I realised that if the circle and border overlapped, not all of the circle would cut

drawing the lines around the border that overlapped with the circle and needed to be cut in processing would be very difficult

so drawing them manually in illustrator might be better

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Further Refinement of Code

File Sent to Laser Cutter

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What if Stacked Circles of Different Material?… Nope

Here I made a very rough model of how the data might look like if I used solely polyprop circles stacked on top of each other. I felt like the layers hid the data and the material allowed way too much light to come through.

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Prototype with a Light Source

Things to consider:

the smaller circles are good for letting less light come through

but the rest of the material is completely opaque

a thinner more translucent material might be more interesting?

seeing the bulb is quite harsh to the eyes

can I put another layer in between?

What’s Next:

try different materials

try layering different materials for desired brightness and so bulb isn’t visible

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Interim Feedback: Where to Next?

Overall, there were two main things that came out of my feedback:

what was my purpose of the product

the ratio between cutting and engraving

From this, I’ve decided that the purpose of my project is to educate/raise awareness about light pollution and encourage a decrease in the amount of light we emit. 

This is where the cutting to engraving ratio is important. To allow less light to come through i want to use small holes. This might be a successful lamp shade.

I could even make packaging that has the stats on it with a simple slogan?

Next Steps...

try different materials

Assemble differently:

stack

slots

full scale model

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Entourage Images: 3D Outputs

Rubbish Bin:

This might be fun to do as it brings 2 types of pollution into a singular aspect. 

The problem with this is that people might associate it with rubbish as its purpose is linked to that

Walkway:

could be a fun installation/walkway

would be dark with the small amount of holes

but that effect doesn’t mirror our skies?

Lamp:

a bit ironic but might be fun

also brings light to the topic as purpose correlates with data

lets small amount of light out so less light pollution?

Chair:

doesn’t really convey a specific meaning if it is a chair

more of an aesthetic instead

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Entourage Images: 2D Outputs

App:

The first idea I had was an app that shows the light pollution in your area

but this meant that the outcome is conceptual as opposed to something realised which doesn’t fit the brief

Booklet: 

would be cool if it were a printed on OHP film? with multiple layers stacked

but I still like the 3D aspect

try combine multiple layers stacked

After playing around with the lasercutter, I really enjoyed creating something 3D as it feels more tangible and can be used.

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Test Output: Square:

Changes:

This was stronger than the triangle I assembled because the glue could stick to each surface

I decided to keep the circles aligned on the x axis because it helped link the various sides of the cube

Where to go next? > how else can I assemble this? > stack???

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Test Output: Triangle

I put my pdf into illustrator and changed it slightly so that it would laser and used scraps of MDF to laser the pattern onto small 70x70mm square panels.

Problems while Lasercutting:

During lasercutting I realised that I completely mixed up the colour key. 

Red was cut, blue is engrave and black was embossed

I also got the settings wrong because I didn’t realise that the scraps of MDF I was using had different thicknesses

as a result I had to laser the 6mm sheet 2x and the edges were a bit burnt

blue and red lines (engraving and cutting need to have a “hairline thickness” of 0.1pt

I kept the engraved line to a thickness of 1pt but because the laser engraves at a similar thickness, it was hard to distinguish between the two.

Problems when assembling

because the cut was perpendicular and not angled it was very hard to glue it cos there was a small point of contact

used blue tak instead but you could see it

also tried to see what the pattern would look like vertical vs horizontal 

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Black = cut so I need to make black smallest so that it shows the smallest amount of light.

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Considering Embossed Circles?…

I started prepping the pdf for lasercutting more by changing some ellipses to have no fill. I filled some circles to visualise the pieces I would want cut or emboss as opposed to just engrave. 

Problems that may arise:

if bigger circles are cut then more of the design will be lost so might cut the smaller set of data

circles that go out side canvas will be cut off but that might add a nice variation

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Experiments with Randomised radius: 

In these experiments, I tried using the random function for all floats of the ellipse(a, b, c, d). This warped the dimensions of circle as well as randomised the position the position

felt like this didnt convey data very well as the proportions were warped