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 were isolated objects. They sat in a corner of the room. Some of them were beautiful or extremely well crafted, but they were always their own thing, isolated in their shell, coming in all kinds of different shapes and sizes.
2 They used these things called “switches” to turn on. They were 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 usage of it. To meet my goal, I identified 3 key concepts.
1 I wanted the experiments to involve not only touching, but also holding, feeling, and looking. I wanted the users to feel the light, and even to face it, as they turned it on.
2 Turning the light on must go beyond pinching a little switch. The gesture should be the bridge between transforming the light from what could be defined as mechanical and obscure into what is 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. I wanted to recreate this act of unveiling, or revealing as a standardized gesture in the form of an object.
Because my project was about making light into a tangible thing you interact with, it wasn’t going to be satisfying if my work stayed theoretical or on paper. So I focused all of my attention to physical prototyping and user testing.
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 user testing 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.
Experiment #3 allows the user to change the direction the light is facing to activate it. My user 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.
Conclusion
Initially, it was easier for me to think about light theoretically, and I didn’t quite know how to begin. To start me off, my professor gave me a bag of LEDs, and I honestly had no idea what any of it did besides to shine a light. My head sort of looked liked this.
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.