Digital Fabrication

Design and make your own lamp with laser cutting technology

Yvo van Os and Jurre Groenenboom, The Hague University of Applied Sciences

Workshop with maximum 8 participants - register via Eventbrite

With the rise of the low budget consumer 3D printers the step of designing and producing your own products has become a lot smaller for interested consumers. Working with such a 3d printer is rather easy and can be compared with an ordinary 2D printer. The challenge now is how consumers can create and model a digital object without having to learn a complex 3D CAD program. There are quite a lot of (web-based) applications on the market already targeting consumers and even children and designed with a focus on easy to learn/intuitive interactions with the digital object.

In this workshop the participants will learn to work with one of those programs in order to make a design of a lampshade. Since 3d printing (still) takes a lot of time to produce an object (especially of the size of a lamp shade) we use a different digital fabrication technique during this workshop: laser cutting. The laser cutter that will be used cuts through materials like wood, plastic and cardboard. The input of the computer-controlled laser is a 2D drawing and the output is 2D shapes cut out of sheets of material. The participants will learn to work with another program that will easily transfer their 3D digital object into 2D digital drawings. After the shapes are cut out, the lampshade will be constructed and assembled with cable and socket.