Trilateral
Trilateral is a sustainable lighting solution for empowering individuals to create and personalise their own lighting units by employing minimal amount of material for manufacturing as well as allowing the users to self-repair the product.
"Infinite combinations, minimum footprint, maximum longevity!"
Product design has several facets and challenges, all of which consume time and resources of the designer, client, and manufacturer. This can lead to overlooking some of the critical considerations that might not have effect in the short term to save those resources; however, this is a real issue that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Even though it is tempting to focus on the short term gains, ignoring the slowly accumulating long term costs would create harm in all scales. Developing sustainable products is difficult, yet I can see that all the additional effort makes the returns greater upon reflecting on the process and final product. I will be talking about sustainability and design considerations, the overall process and my reflections on it, and assessing the solution.
During the assembly of a prototype.
The Issue: Understanding Sustainability Challenges
Empowering local skills allow local economies to foster, allowing accessibility and diversity of available goods and skills. In addition to that, this allows transfer of skills while creating options different from mass-produced goods (Dogan & Walker, 2008). I believe that material and form of threads can make real difference in a product they were utilised in.
Personalisation is something we don’t see in many of the products nowadays; on the top of that, our reliance on mass production goods can make us less aware of our actual needs, which can create a gap that can never be actually filled by those products. Mass produced goods usually offer little to no personalisation and alteration options on the consumers' side. A common exception to that might be the digital personalisations done within our personal electronic devices, which isn’t something entirely relevant here as those personalisations stay within the digital domain. Personalisation is something that both empowers the consumers and inputs their unique wants and needs into the products (Marchand, Walker, & Cooper, 2010).
Product longevity is maybe one of the most critical feature of a sustainable product, the reason for that would be the fact that it defines how long a product is kept and used. When we look at the consumption of products nowadays, we see that there are more individual options than ever, which tend to get unfashionable and undesirable quickly as time passes. Many of the products can war and tear within a relatively short time. These factors can make consumers discard the products they own before even establishing a bond with them enough for wanting to keep them. It is stated that elongated product use, their durability, and repairability allow emotional connections between products and the people to happen, eventually establishing a history between user and the product (Walker, 2010).
Parts of the laser-cut final product: ready to assemble by bare hands.
The Solution: Personalisation, Longevity, Empowerment
The process of making this product posed many challenges as I wanted to create a product with four sustainability considerations that are integrated with each other harmoniously.
Firstly, I wanted to empower those who make threads out of natural and sustainable materials. Threads can have great variety based on the how they were weaved and the characteristics of materials used for making them. These aspects of a thread greatly affect its interaction with the light, making natural materials more favourable for using with this product. Personalisation aspect of the product required exploration and testing with materials and prototypes; although, the idea was to allow users to make different compositions whether they are experienced with using thread or entirely inexperienced when it comes to hand skills.
The second phase involved transition from wood to cardboard as the structural material, and ditching the glass jar. Using cardboard meant weaker structural integrity in certain directions, so I had to make it more robust through merging multiple layers. I laser cut the parts and attached them through insertion details. Some forms of cardboard were too fragile so I had to refrain from using corrugated ones to prevent the teeth part from disintegrating. The feedback sessions shown that it could be bent while winding the threads due to lack of horizontal supports.
The idea was to create a customisable (and structurally determinate) framework that would enable virtually infinite combinations via its interactions with the material via its teeth.
I utilised the same cardboard in the third phase while optimising the design to make it less wasteful. I increased the size, which decreased the structural integrity as size to thickness ratio increased even through there were two additional supports. Additionally, light could not pass those supports due to their size. Last of all, the teeth became extremely fragile and weak due to new and optimised design for reducing material waste.
All of the disadvantages forced me to explore new materials. The origins of wood and balsa were difficult to track while the harvesting methods seemed questionable, metal and steel seemed very difficult to manufacture, which stood against my considerations, plastic was out of the picture due to its overall harm to the environment. Plywood could be bent easily and had poor longevity. On the other hand, MDF seemed like a wonder material for this particular case as it is being made through recycling in relatively simple process while it is manufactured locally while having both flexibility, ease of intermediate processing, and robustness.
An additional consideration for me to enable it to be manufactured (or in batches) without wasting material; thus, I reduced waste within the closed shape to 2%.
Assessment of the Solution
Sustainability is a multi-dimensional design consideration; the process and outcome thereof shows that it is a set of conclusions in order to design superior sustainable products rather than 'sustainable' gimmicks.
> Every material offers trade-offs, optimal properties need to be sought.
> The whole pipeline of materials and how the product is manufactured affects the initial properties of the material greatly in therms of sustainability.
> The user must be kept in the loop throughout the process, otherwise the emotional longevity of the product would be jeopardised.
> Sustainability-centric approach is a key for challenging the status quo of profit-centric producers and a tool for exerting pressure on them.
