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The Goodlights

Design Studio 2 - Partner Project
Spring 2023

2-Month Industrial Design & Aesthetic Exploration Project

Shared rooms, conflicting sleep schedules, limited free-time, and niche reading positions all contribute to an environment hostile to reading in the evenings. The Goodlights are a series of three reading lights that strive to ease these issues through effective, but aesthetically pleasing fixtures.

My Role

I led the ideative and definition stages, with all shown sketches, written materials, and renderings being my work. I also conducted the bulk of the aesthetic and user research, along with the testing sessions.

My partner, Aaden Butler, was led the construction steps, and was responsible for all mechanical and material decisions and actual prototype and product assembly. He also assisted with the initial product brainstorming.

Brief, Research, & Problem Definition

This project began with the prompt “It is difficult for me to read at night”, the restriction to use exclusively recycled materials, and the requirement to make a series of three products, and to emulate the aesthetics of minimalist industrial designer Alain Monnens.

We narrowed down our problem space into the following statement:

“How can we design three different iterations of a light that allows for nighttime reading in a dark, shared room?”

Moodboard of Alain Monnen’s style

I then identified a number of key stylistic and functional choices persistent in Alain Monnens’s portfolio:

Ideation

Initial Sketches

Our goals when ideating light concepts were the following:

Unobtrusive to others in the room
Accommodates various reading positions
Considers varying reading condition preferences
Can be easily turned off and on without noise or significant movement

Surveyed from college students with roommates who read either for classes or for recreation

Refined Sketches

Rough Prototypes, Models, & User Tests

After conducting a critique session of our drawn concepts, we pivoted a few of the designs slightly.

We then began creating low-fidelity prototypes, prioritizing depth of function—namely the maneuverability of the lights—to investigate the practical ease-of-use of our concepts. We deprioritized material and visual fidelity for this iteration of physical prototypes, instead deciding to use CAD 3D models to explore the visual criteria.

I modeled the three lights in Rhino 3D, attempting to clearly show the lights’ silhouettes and geometric forms.

Stand

Triangle

Hoover

With our prototypes, we conducted both long-term and internal short-term user testing sessions to discover what details to edit, remove, or add for our final prototypes.

Final Prototypes & Conclusion

In the detailed prototype iterations we sought to address user feedback and improve the design aspects we chose to deprioritize in the rough prototyping stage. In particular, we addressed critique about the lights’ stability, lack of signifiers, unnecessary resistance to movement, and aesthetics.