To start off, I wanted to better understand what light is, and created this mind map, classifying light and its various characteristics. Looking at it afterwards, what stood out to me was the different states of light and our material interactions with it.
Market Research & Analysis
After this initial stage of categorization and analysis of what light is, we started looking into the market for what was out there, brainstorming together with some fellow classmates. From this research, I concluded 3 points.
1 Lamps are isolated objects. They sit in the corner of a room. Some of them are beautiful and well crafted, but they are self-contained and isolated in their shell.
2 They turn on through switches. These switches are mostly binary: either on or off. Others included gradual activators, like dials, where you could rotate this little cylinder brighten the light.
I identified these as learned interactions. Nothing about rotating a small little cylinder was innately intuitive.
3 Light is ambiguous and fragile. It’s very dependent on its surroundings. And it's hard to conceptualize it as something that’s present in the room. To me it’s almost like haze, as you walk outside you know it's out there, but you can’t feel it, or breathe it.
Based on my analysis of the lighting market, I wanted to see if I could create a series of experiments to come up with some new interactions with light that defied our current usages of it. To meet my goal, I identified 3 keywords.
1 I wanted the experiments to involve not only touching, but also holding, feeling, and looking. The users should feel the light as they turned it on.
2 Turning the light on must go beyond pinching a little switch. A gesture should be the bridge between light and the true switch activator, the body, transforming the activation of light and electricity from the mechanical and obscure to bodily engaging and interactive.
3 Gesture is a motion, it has a beginning, and an end. This was a perfect opportunity to experiment with the binary of the on and off. One of the first binary I tested was the veiling and unveiling of a light source, like the unveiling of a window in the morning.
The core idea of my method for exploring gesture was to get my friends to really act out different motions of the body. This was one of the exercises that I made, where I had my friends draw the natural trajectory of their arm movement with a pen. This became the source for the first experiment seen below.
Prototypes & User Testing
Experiment #1: where the user can slide this shade (veil) along a curved rail, to reveal units of light one by one.
On the right is the precursor to the curved rail light. The user would slide the veil along this straight axis to reveal the LEDs one by one. Due to the size and more engaging, grander bodily interaction this second curved version was much preferred by my test subjects.
Experiment #2 allows you to turn the light on by lifting it’s veil up. The light is on when the veil is off.
This was a fully functional "works like" model that I made to illustrate the concept. There is a hidden notch under the veil that breaks the conductivity of the circuit when the transparent veil is down. When it is lifted up, the conduction is complete and the lights are on. I preferred to display it here with a transparent "veil".
Experiment #3 allows the user to change the direction the light is facing to activate it. My testers likened it to a person looking up or down, or the motion of sunflowers moving to face the sun.
For this particular one it was also interesting to see if the user would move all of them at once or play with them separately.
The two above, as well as the two below this text are initial prototypes. On the left was a slide-to-reveal motion that I tested out. I was also experimenting with different kinds of handles and things to grab at this point. For example, a lot of my user testers didn’t like the grip on the left, they thought it was unintuitive.
In contrast, users liked the use of a handle here in this one. It was more intuitive, and someone even said that it was like opening a door. They defined the motion as more transformative and engaging. This later become the inspiration for Experiment #2, introduced before.
These were two different ways rotation (rotate-to-reveal-light) could be used. After my user testing, it was clear that rotation was too simple and unintuitive. Users preferred grander and more transformative motions.
Core principle of gesture in
enacting this binary
Because I had to start from scratch on how to use basic electronics, I believe that it influenced how I approached what artificial light could be for me. I decided to question light from its most fundamental state of the on and off binary: the gesture in the middle acting as the bridge in-between. All of my models that followed were made mirroring this core ideology.