Shell Lamp

Life structure

In a continuing environmental crisis, I see consumer 3d printers as the solution to consolidating our material use as we enter the age of recyclable bioplastics. It's important that we give new qualities to these simple materials, boosting the repertoire of our tools. In the shell lamp, diffusion of light occurs through the natural channels of the structure, giving PLA a new function, shaping light. If both structure and beauty can be produced by the same material then we have limited our emissions to a single source, in the words of Neri Oxman, “A fruit bearing fruit tree”.

My inspiration began as I observed the recent popularity of salt and wicker lamps. Rather than being simply a light source, they act more like modern candles, emitting less light than a standard desk lamp, while behaving more like sculpture. Putting my own spin on the natural material lamp, I wanted to further the conversation between software and human collaboration. I see the shell lamp as a hybrid object enabled by nTopology software. Its design is not completely self-generated because I retain the power to choose the cellular size, shape, distribution, surface pattern, and the form that contains them. This lets me have more artistic control than the uneditable computer generated structures previously available. This is very important because as a designer I get to reclaim the choices that go into building a natural form. As humans we don’t yet fully understand how these patterns are made but we are slowly gaining more control and artistic choice as our programs become more interactive.

Read more at: https://designwanted.com/shell-lamp-noah-taylor/