This week I spent more time on redefining the concept idea for my project. I decided, after creating some prototypes in Week 2 (you can read more about that here), that I should be more ambitious if I want to graduate with the best product I’ve ever designed. After reading again through the research material I gathered in the first semester, I thought about designing a lighting system for hotel rooms instead of creating just another simple lamp. I’m aware this project would require much more resources and time than the one I was trying to achieve before, but this is also much more exciting if I manage to achieve what I envision here.

The idea would be to create a controller that can switch on/off up to three lights in the hotel room. The concept is based on the shape of a CYLINDER. The controller itself and lamps would all be having the same shape, however, they would work in different ways. What I want to achieve here is simplifying the way people interact with the lighting systems in hotels. With the controller, you can easily change the brightness of the lights by turning around the side of the controller which can rotate accordingly. What I came up with was the idea to work with three different lamps:

LAMP 1 – Mood light – Bedside table
LAMP 2 – Work light – Desk
LAMP 3 – Ambient light – Ceiling

With this project, I aim to design the controller, which would work through Arduino, and the 3 lamps as well.

This first lamp would work as a bedside table light, it can either sit on the table or attached to the wall.

The design is a cylinder and the top of it would emit light through LEDs.

The second lamp is designed to work well as a relaxing light for the desk. It would illuminate the surface of the table around it and be perfect for a hotel room as the usual things that people do is working on a laptop or writing down some notes on paper. For this reason, I didn’t think of designing something more complex, like a traditional table lamp which would emit light from the top onto the desk. The LEDs, in this case, are placed all around the inside of this cylinder. Again, people will be able to control the brightness of this through the controller.

The third lamp I’m going to design will be for the ceiling: the biggest one in terms of size, around 28cm versus 18cm and 23cm of the previous ones. In this scenario, the light would be emitted from the bottom surface of the cylinder.

I think this week was great: I finally decided what the project will be about. Really different from the one I did last year and also much more ambitious. Now I feel like I have a much better idea of what I want to achieve. Next week I will design the controller and try to create a 3D model of it. Definitely a work in progress!