Invert Shade
Computational Design, CNC Fabrication, Lighting Design
A pendant shade pair cut as one flat piece and formed over a cylindrical frame, with a Grasshopper definition driving both the form and the organic cut-out pattern from a handful of sliders. Drawn for the Salone Satellite track at Milan's furniture fair.
- Drawing title
- Sheet 04-02
- Organisation
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- Year
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- Sector
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- Built with
Background
INDN 342, Digital Fabrication, taken from concept through to a full prototype. The brief was set for the Salone Satellite track, the emerging-designer section of Milan's Salone del Mobile furniture fair.
What I built
A pendant light designed to hang in a pair, both shades cut from a single flat sheet and bent into a tapered cone over a cylindrical acrylic diffuser that holds the form and carries the light.
The shape is not drawn, it is generated. A Grasshopper definition controls the height, the base radius and an asymmetric lean, and generates the organic cut-out pattern across the surface from four parameters: how sharp the curves are, how large, how far apart, and how many. Moving one slider produces a different shade that is still recognisably from the same family, which is what the gallery render of roughly thirty variants is there to show. The submitted pair is one point in that space rather than the only answer it can give.
The documentation carries the same logic down to the physical part: an exploded assembly, orthographic elevations, a section cut, a flat laser-cut pattern, and a force diagram tracing tension, support and load through the single rigid joint at the top of each shade.
Outcome
Invert Shade was entered into the ECC Lighting Design Award. It did not place. That is stated plainly because it is the fact: the piece is worth showing on the strength of the definition and the fabrication behind it, not on a result it did not get.
It is also the earliest thing here that works the way the professional work does now. A parametric definition that holds a family of outcomes, driven by a handful of named parameters and taken all the way to a fabrication drawing, is the same method as the earthworks and cross-section tooling on this site, five years earlier and pointed at a lampshade.
