Life Lamp concept diagram: three heartbeat values overlaying on top of a baby, an adult and an elderly silhouette. Side by side with the resulting respective 3D geometries.

Life Lamp: Connecting Design and People Through Emotion

Date	2020-06-01
Authors	Daniel Nunes Locatelli, Leonardo Prazeres, Guilherme Giantini, Vitor Curti, Carlos Augusto Requena
Place	ECAADE 2020 Anthropologic
Language	English
Link	Life Lamp paper at ECAAD 2020

Life Lamp represented a dual endeavor, serving as both a project and a research initiative. As a freelancer, I dedicated my afternoons to collaborating with Estúdio Guto Requena, contributing to the computational strategy to bring the already established concept to life.

The design process is a hybrid between top-down and bottom-up approaches. We worked both with predefined heart-like 3D models as the design base and with agent-based modelling, widely explored by Craig Reynolds in the 1980s.

The programming part was developed using Grasshopper 3D, the two-weeks old plugin Culebra v2.0 for the agent-based modelling in conjunction with the plugin Firefly to capture the heartbeats.

This work became later a paper presented at the ECAAD 2020

Connecting Design and People Through Emotion

Nowadays it is possible to use technology to achieve emotion-oriented products related to the user experience. The aim of this paper is to address a design exploration that combines the use of algorithmic modeling in order to create a design that seeks to express meaning through emotional bonds with people.

Life Lamp was created to represent a life cycle as a sensitive object consisting of three layers and a unique shade that produces a complex image, expressing the paths and surprises of our existence.

The design process is a hybrid between top-down and bottom-up approaches. The designers worked both with a predefined heart-like 3D model as the design base and with agent-based modeling, widely explored by Craig Reynolds in the 1980s.

Life lamp is a product that emerged as a result of Estúdio Guto Requena's research that investigates the impact of digital culture through design by seeking to merge technology and affection.

Agents creating the structure using the heartbeat of a preborn.

Intermediate step: connecting the preborn shape with the adult shape.

Agents creating the structure using the heartbeat of an adult.

Workflow diagram: Heartbeat, Sound Processing, Rhinoceros, 3D printing, LED assembly.

Path diagram for the agents and a section of the final thickened paths.

Diagram: heartbeats of a preborn at 120 bpm; of an adult at 90 bpm; and of an old person at 70 bpm.