By the way, if you are a salsa lover, you definetly should visit Riga. And check out both Riga salsa festival and Latvia salsa festival which will take a part there in summer.

So, about the last project. It began on December before going home where we had to create an interactive lamp. This was heavy but interesting project just for a week.

Planning an interactive lamp

Before sketching and presenting our ideas of the lamp, we concentrated on  4 things:

Sketch interactive lamp

• light – you can do amazing things with this beautiful phenomenon of the world,
• interaction – it needed to be simple, but innovative, and fitting in overall theme of the lamp,
• materials – should be high quality, also fitting with a theme of the lamp,
• symbolism – represent the light, communicate theme.

Then we continued with sketching our (crazy) ideas and presenting 3 selected to our peers. As I haven’t done a sketching much before, I was surprised how creativity starts to flow after diving into sketching. I ensured again that our minds (individually and collectively) are such a great source of ideas if opened by right techniques.

So basically my idea was to create a lamp where you put a finger inside and blinks accordingly to your heartbeats.

Planning a form & interaction

Ideas on a form of interactive lamp

After talking with people (our supervisor and course mates) we decided that this idea would be interesting to make. As this was a first I am creating any electronics (I have been only breaking it when I was a child), I also contacted our electronics teacher as early as possible. After his accept of possibility to create electronics for this in a week, I continued further.

Now as idea was clear it needed to decide on form which would support a topic of heartbeats/life. There were a couple of candidates – an egg, a stream, century plant, an oak leaf and a circle. I selected an egg, as I thought it would be more interesting that something would happen inside. Besides, it supports an idea of life pretty well (a birth).

Next part was to plan how somebody will interact with this lamp. It was clear from beginning that a finger will be put in. But what should happen? Will the color of light change? So in my case I chose the easiest way – just to blink a light according to heartbeats.

Creating a form & assembling electronics

Form of an interactive lamp

When the idea of what should be created was clear, I decided to start making a form. I thought it would be more appropirate to make the container (egg) from a foam. So I cut two halfs of an egg with an empty middle (for electronics and LEDs).

It was quite a challenge to cut a precise egg form in 3D environment, on a paper it looks easy, but not in real world … Significant part of cutting was based on intuition.

A grey tube on the top of egg is meant to be a place where a finger should be put in. Basically a technique was to let the light (LED) shine through a finger while on the other end receiving changes of the light (transparency of finger) by a light depended resistor.

A challenge here was to to keep as short distance between light emittor and receiver as possible. An additional thing was that if distance would be wrong, there wouldn’t be time for me to change this (so probably I needed more planning there).

The intellectual part of electronics was planned to make using an Arduino prototyping platform. Special thanks for Meng Li who has made her (similar) project accessible to the public.

After the form of a foam was ready, I needed to make the pieces of glass for holes (to see the light inside), put LEDs inside and a photoresistor. Then I glued both parts together and put another clay layer outside, so it would be an egg solid. Then I needed just to paint it black and add the electronic circuit (thanks to our electronics teacher). The electronic circuit was working, but I was concerned if the distance between light emitter and receiver will be enough. Unfortunately it was not, so I was sad a little bit and ashamed because I had also to present it at exhibition.

Are you alive?

However, the best thing we can do is to try better next time and not become too upset, because that becomes a paralysis – a waste of our hours of life that we can’t get back

Presenting at exhibition

At the end we had to present our work at exhibition, where students from electronics and interaction design also took a part. I was impressed what is possible to make by electronics and I never thought that I will do something like that will electronics. That was inspiring.

You can check some of other reeeeally interesting lamps and other interactive developments in my Flickr account.