Dazzle Lamp is part of a series of design experiments in the intersection of creative coding and digital fabrication. Digital fabrication and impacts design on many levels: formal and material qualities, customisation, sharing and distribution of both design ideas and production. These experiments question the agency of both ‘file’ and ‘factory’ within the ‘file-to-factory’ paradigm and allow both computational and material processes leave traces in the end result.
Dazzle lamp looks at the potential of 3D colour printing to embed different states within an object. The prototypes are printed using zcorp colour printer, that prints using a coloured binder and gypsum like powder. The colours are applied on the inside of the lamps and only emerge when the they are lit from the inside. Colours are sampled from an image and applied to the inside of a low-polygon mesh. Although this colour data send to the machine is two dimensional – either a texture or one colour per face or vertex – through the material process of fabrication it bleeds into the material and becomes three dimensional.
A custom application was developed to design the lamps, giving control over overall shape, degree of deformation and colour. The application was developed in processing building upon several libraries – he_mesh, toxiclibs, controp5, peasycam. The triangulated shape, derived form the mesh necessary for 3D printing, looks similar but different depending on the angle you look at the lamp. The application and fabrication technology allow each lamp to be unique and designed by anybody, although aesthetically and formally they clearly belong to the same family.
