Planning the Pedagogical Strategy: Designing with the Intangible
In Project 2 the students develop two furniture projects during the semester. This is done in order to start using design tools in the process and strengthen concepts such as utility, firmness and beauty, based on Vitruvio’s maxims: Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas. In the initial six-week project, the students are faced with a lighting challenge: they must design a 1.60 m high standing luminaire.
What is a luminaire? A luminaire is a set of elements that transform the source of light, which can include lamps or light bulbs. In our case, it goes beyond designing a floor lamp.1 A standing luminaire is designed because it transforms the source of light that is used (LED tape) and is made up of a base, a body and a finial.
The parts of a standing luminaire
Why are the students faced with designing a standing luminaire? Because it is an object that requires the student to demonstrate knowledge about materials, structures, assemblies, manufacturing processes and functionality. Its difficulty can be addressed in a freshman year semester and thus involves different areas of learning such as visual representation, the development of models, the application of physical principles, and a design methodology to reach a final result. But it does not end there; the exercise requires addressing immateriality. In the book, How to Design a Lamp? (2016), by the London Design Museum, this concept is explained: “Light occupies a space and exists as a medium that discovers and describes that space. The lamp produces light, which cannot be touched but has a deeply emotional presence.”
In this vein, the product permeates the students’ imaginations as a project with the perfect balance between the advanced and the basic, between design and engineering, between the rational and the emotional. It is used as an initial exercise to train product design engineers. This individual exercise has been present since 2016 and at the end of each semester the results are displayed in an event called, The Light Is On. The event integrates music, visual experience and the staging of the works developed by the students. The event was created with the idea of motivating the students to have the university community participate in their design proposals.
Posters of the 2016 and 2017 events
First The Light Is On event in 2015
Additionally, in six weeks the exercise allows the students to create a functional model that entails an implicit challenge: the luminaire must turn on and the students will have to test the final result. It is one thing to create the lamp and quite another to make it, which is a process that constitutes the basic principle of innovation (Robinson and Aronica, 2009). But why is it so motivating to design a lamp?
Well, we have to start by saying that the brief poses a difficult exercise to copy because there are very few examples in search engines like Google or Pinterest for the category “floor lamp + light source with LED tape”. Students must design the luminaire from scratch. The first time the challenge was proposed in 2016, they had to be inspired by nature, and in the second and third versions the architects of the world were their source of inspiration. Each one worked in a particular language or style that allowed them to reach different results. In addition, the light source with LED tape implies a greater challenge, because most of the existing lamps on the market use spherical or tubular bulbs.
The budget limit and the use of materials such as pine, steel and paper also make it possible for the project to be built in a week, once the entire design is complete. These conditions force the students to use the available resources in the best way, while they advance in the exercise and decide what factors will allow the lamp to be stable, firm, useful and beautiful. The students become witnesses to what happens when following the methodology.
But the most important thing is motivation: it makes learning and reaching a final result easier for a student who has never designed a complete product or has not had the experience of creating an object. If the student sees the progress and finishes a first product, he will naturally be motivated to continue. In addition, if he exhibits his product as part of an event and you recognize himself as a design engineer along with others, he will see the finished product of all his effort. It can be said that up to this point, the students have experienced a metacognitive process. However, the meaning of the exercise understood from a human level, could be deeper and more reflective. How can it be taken to that next level?
A Passionate Leitmotif: Choosing a Universal Inspiration
The starting point of a design exercise in the freshman year can be as varied and diverse as nature, art, film, music, literature or architecture. In the case of the lamp exercise, the theme of light is aligned with the emotions. One can talk about inner light and how it allows us to edify ourselves as human beings: “The lamp is an inner mirror, it invites them to look at an object again, in light of what they have not been conscious of.”(Ramos, 2017).
The Little Prince as a source of inspiration. Week 1
In this regard, the starting point of the exercise in its fourth version is based on reflection, ethics and virtues. We decided to work with these issues as the DNA of the exercise and sought a universal work of literature that allowed us to achieve our goal. Thus, in Project 2 a strategic alliance was developed between EAFIT’s Center for Integrity to address the virtue of integrity in the classroom and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. The reason for this, is the fact that it is a timeless book, which addresses the virtues and miseries of humanity and the reader is invited to reflect upon the meaning of life. Its visual richness, metaphors, characters and meditations became the focal point in the design of the luminaire and allowed a connection between the design apprentice’s inner journey (the emotional) and the materialization of the intangible, which is the very act of designing.
Developing the lamp exercise using The Little Prince, allows the students to connect with humanity itself, and give meaning to the profession by doing, creating and materializing.
Why is it important for a product design engineer to reflect on friendship, ego, humility or appearances? Because these qualities as well as how they are going to launch out into the world determines their value as professionals. The Little Prince encourages the students to think about these values, and they can be made tangible in the exercise of the luminaire. The inspiration is sought thinking about the meaning of life with the purpose of reflecting it in the design of a product.
On the concept of inspiration, the psychologist Carlos Arturo Ramírez tells us: “Inspiration is a gift of the spirit, which, in the form of an occurrence and of enthusiastic enlightenment, provides what may appear as a simple idea; but it guides us, drives us, and comforts us.” (2012, p. 362).
If the leimoteif is to learn to design with meaning and not as a mechanical exercise, where it would be the same to design one object or another: How should the process be developed for the students to learn a profound lesson, endowed with meaning?
