Thursday, August 3, 2023
Scrap to Lamp in Twelve Hours
It was an unusual assignment: make a prototype of a product but include in it found and re-purposed objects as components. I gave it my usual reaction: days of procrastination followed by earnest effort beginning the night before the assignment was due.
In my spare time I had been disassembling discarded computers. The idea that rare and precious metals could be extracted from computer innards had caught my imgination. How to do it was still a mystery but I did know that each computer only contained minute amounts of desirable metal. I figured that by the time I had enough to process I'd've figured out the chemistry. The evening before my project was due I brought some circuit boards to the department model shop. A classmate had asked for a spare one to cut up and use to represent the board in a mockup of a product he was designing.
As we chatted about our assignments, and I mentioned that I still had no ideas for mine, I held up a board he'd rejected for his purpose and noticed the green glow that came through the parts of the board not covered by chips, capacitors, and other electronics. I was amused that it reminded me of the glow from the green glass shade of a style lamp I'd always liked: the desk lamp with the brass base and pull chain, whose shade points the light discretely down at the desk where it belongs, shining only a faint green glow upward. The desk lamp, in my mind anyway, of bank executives, college deans, and other serious people in their paneled offices. I found it funny that these two objects, the already obsolete piece of digital gadgetry in my hand, and the timeless lamp, still useful a century after it was introduced, had this trait in common: a green glow under the right backlighting. And there was my idea - to use circuit boards as elements in a lightshade!
I turned to my sketch book to develop the idea further. After a few sketches I came to that vital first realization of any new design idea: what I thought I'd imagined wouldn't work, but there was a core idea worth pursuing. There wasn't time to replicate the form of the inspiring desk lamp. And a circuit board would make an ill-fitting shade for it, anyway. However, more sketches and a few minutes sorting through the circuit boards on hand led to a workable concept: four identical cards could be assembled into a rectangular style lamp shade. An aluminum casting taken from a 5-1/4" floppy disc drive would be the base. Some scraps of conduit and sheet metal would assemble the shade and hold it on the base. A trip to the local big box home imporovement center - open 24hours in those heady days of the late '90s boom - secured the nuts, bolts, and lamp compnents to make the thing work.
I put it all together in the small hours of the morning, caught a catnap, then blearily presented the lamp in class later that day.