Mechanical expanding cardboard lamp - This way up!

Step 2 The chosen solution - discussion and exposition

I'm going to write a little about my design process and solution, and and not about the actual project. If you just want plans and ideas about the lamp, jump to step 5.

It's a bit of a cheat when the designer is also the client, because there's really no way to apply an objective rationale to whether something is right or not: I put my designers hat on, and say "I think the user (me) would like this to be blue", then take my designers hat off and put my client's hat on, and say "this designer is incredibly perceptive. I love blue things". We each give ourselves pats on the back for being so good.

So I won't pretend that the idea I went for was arrived at through strictly kosher design practices, but I do maintain that I have made defensible design decisions at arriving at it.

Designers do that, they are taught continuously to have faith and confidence in their own feelings about a form or an idea, and when that faith is strong (like when you are peddling your own particular aesthetic or functional dogma), it's not hard to come up with good justifications for choices, whether or not they are qualitatively the best. As if you can really measure that stuff anyway.

At university, there was a lot of energy expended trying to get us (students) to appear to put method into our decision-making. This made them defensible or sellable, depending on your emphasis. Roughly speaking, each time you have an empirical reason for making a certain choice, you have a feature that can be marketed and sold.

Which is very good, but it certainly seemed to me that many of the "features" that found their way into a design were not designed at all, in that they were not a solution to a problem, brought about by objective enquiry and experimentation. Rather, the feature was something which occurred to the designer after executing a sketch, as a way of giving that sketch - and by extension, the designer - value. It was just something the designer thought was cool and figured out a way of making it seem functional. There wasn't enough compromise for my liking - there was no clear line between when a design was right because it fit the brief, and when it was right because it was neat enough to capture the designers imagination.

Designers will tell you that they design well for precisely the same reason - they experiment with sketches and maquettes (models), then interrogate each design to identify the things that they like and the things they don't, then do another iteration, hopefully with more of the former in it, and less of the latter, then do it again and again. That's the formal design process in a nutshell, and it's good - a process of refinement. But designers will inevitably put something of themselves and their own pet styles and techniques into each project, and that was the bit that I was uncomfortable with.

It's perfectly appropriate to add some individualism, but perhaps I have a poorly constructed sense of self-entitlement, or just lack confidence in my graphical communication skills, but so many of the choices, particularly in styling (where it is very difficult to measure "rightness") boiled down to "because I think it looks cool that way".

I like clever things; machines, intricate things with levers and cams and gears. My favourite object in the world is the collapsible hood from my Rolleiflex 3.5F camera's waist-level viewfinder. It is truly a thing of beauty. Utterly elegant, looking effortless but finely tuned and engineered like a real instrument. The designer of the hood wasn't trying to put something of his own style into the device, he was making a machine that worked, treading a fine line between complexity and reliability. There is no material objection that can be made about the hood - you can't dislike the way it looks because it just looks like what it is, almost like no aesthetic choice has been made.

Of course this too is just so much conceit: The hood is styled as with any product, just as much as brutalist architecture is styled, or the latest digital camera is styled. The difference is, I feel, is that the styling is sympathetic to the object. It doesn't hide the mechanical workings because they are the ugly bit: it protects them because they are the beautiful bit.

All of this digression is just my way of explaining why I eventually settled on the kind of design I did: I just thought it was cool that way. The mechanism captured my imagination and I ran with it, afterwards coming up with lots of other justifications about why it was right. I think most designers do that. Of course craftsmen, hobbyists, artists don't have to have any such pretensions about their motives: If you like it, then it's right.

Now lets look at the design.