The Plant Lamp

As part of my first year in the Industrial Design program, one of the introductory projects was the making of a lamp from scratch. The objective was to use and become comfortable with each available wood-working tool in the shop; personally, I had never used a lathe before and I enjoyed it more than I expected I would.

The premise was to take an allotted amount of wood - poplar in this case - and turn it into one half of a lamp shade. This would become the buck for vacuforming two halves of the would-be lamp.

After the polystyrene was heated and formed, it was up to us to make it into a seamless and deliberate take on the everyday household lamp.

For whatever reason, I decided a giant plant was most fitting. Doing so enabled me to expand the project beyond just a lit shade and create a custom base, “stem”, and switch. Below the process pictures is the original packet I submitted for a grade in 2019.