Design & Digital Fabrication 1E: Create Your Own Illuminated Object

Are you interested in industrial design, making your own unique creations, or using machines to create high-quality products? Learn how to create products that you design and fabricate with professional tools!

In Create Your Own Illuminated Object, students engage in a hands-on process in order to learn how to design shapes in 2D in order to translate their designs into visually stunning 3-dimensional objects. In addition to this, students will also learn basics related to electricity and electronics by assembling their own portable LED lamp. This lamp will then be enclosed within the unique object that the students have designed and produced, resulting in an amazing, professional-looking illuminated object that students can take home.

Create your own illuminated object

Create your own illuminated object

Through this process, participants will learn to use industry-standard vector-editing software such as Adobe Illustrator to create products that will then be cut using a plotter. Students will learn about design, geometry, production, CNC machines, electricity, and unique approaches to product design and creation while engaging in an innovative project-based process as they make their own contemporary illuminated objects.

We will begin with exercises that help ‘train our brains’ to think of 3-dimensional forms in terms of surfaces or flattened patterns through a hands-on exploration of the Platonic solids, which students will build. We will then move into presentations that offer insight into the works of other professional designers and fabricators, their design process and the use of products in our daily lives. From here, we will create paper ‘sketches’ of our proposed designs, test the ideas, and learn how to translate these designs into the vector editing program. Through guided exercises, the students will develop unique graphics that can then be turned into tool paths and cut on the plotter in Mylar and Vinyl-Plastic to create the final pieces used to assemble the illuminated object.

 
While this class is fast-paced, it is designed to be accessible and enjoyable for newcomers to these topics, and we will review necessary fundamentals of graphic design, electronics, and production.