Mechanical expanding cardboard lamp - This way up!

Step 3 The chosen solution

The structure of the lamp is based on a lazy-tong kind of mechanism - or more accurately, a scissor-lift of the kind used around building sites and tall buildings.

I initially anticipated using thin square box-section steel for the structure and some kind of spring-loaded, tension, or friction based mechanism for how it went up and down.

One thing I was sure of was that it had to move up and down without requiring much effort - bearing it's own weight - and it had to change it's brightness depending on it's configuration. The former was based on observing the beauty and elegance of anglepoise-type lamps where spring tension and weight is in equilibrium, but my eventual production design owes much more to Richard Sapper's Tizio desk lamp http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/euwcm/ho_1988.236.10.htm which has no locking, no friction, no tension, no nothing, just well-engineered balance.

I tried some different mechanisms using Lego and Mechano, all based on the "supported corners" idea (sketch) that I'd seen used on the Skylon sculpture that was part of the Festival of Britain in 1951. None of these designs worked: they all relied too heavily on the supports being perfectly symmetrical - something that I anticipated I could do only with a lot of gearing and engineering. I would struggle to prototype it. Which is a shame, because it would lend a lot of lightness to the design, much in the same way as Skylon appears to be floating above the ground, the lamp would appear to be floating above the base. The sketch shows dabbling with the idea of a four-way scissor mechanism, where two sets of tongs are set at right angles to one another, crossing at the joints.