The goal of this project is to create a 'vessel of light' which is a housing for a light bulb. The limitations of the projects include using only laser cut plywood to create the 'vessel of light', not using glue in the 'vessel of light', using only two sheets of A2 ply wood.

The user/ audience that this product is aimed at is simply the general public as a product that they would put in their homes to display and use.

To come up with this design, I had researched interesting lamps and lampshades. I also researched on lamps made of ply wood to gain inspirations. Most of the lamps used simple joints and through them gave the two-dimensional ply wood a three-dimensional shape.

Some other techniques that I observed while researching is that people also laser engrave design or cut design onto the ply wood. However, the direction of this project that I wanted to go towards is to accentuate the beauty of joints and their forms rather than just simply adding graphics onto the ply wood.

The project began with us learning how to use the laser cutting machine by doing simple projects assigned to us. We began with creating a simple lamp shade from grey board with simple shapes. Then we created a 'waffle' structure by CADing the design first before bringing it to illustrator to laser cut it out. Lastly, we made a bracelet structure out of ply wood with joints. These exercises included techniques that could be used in the final product and was very helpful as an introduction to laser cutting.

For the final product, I wanted somethings with an unusual joint that I have not really seen during my research. I thought of using a joint that worked on counter acting forces to hold the structure together without the use of glue. It was challenging to CAD out the model in rhino as there was many angles and I was not as proficient with rhino then compared to the present me. After creating the structure, I projected it to the cplane and exported it to illustrator. 

After that I would proceed to laser cut out the design without issue such as tolerance. The final product was almost what I envisioned this to be, but it was a little more unstable that I thought it would be but still managed to stand up without additional support. Some things that I believe could have been improved on is that the lamp shade could cover more light as it was still too bright.

Some things that I have learnt from this project would be techniques for laser cutting and also CADing. These techniques will help me in the future to prototype my projects in the future and also create better products in the future.