Playlight: Play With Light!

Wanna make a cute, simple lamp that children can play with? Well, this is the Instructable for you!

Playlight is wall lamp for children between four and ten years of age that uses batteries as its power source to avoid problems that arise when children and electricity are in the same context. This lamp also has interchangeable lampshades (made of a transparent material such as acetate or methacrylate) in various colors. Also, the lamp can be hung on the wall using two brackets and two closed sockets on the lamp.

In this way, children can play with the light and enjoy it by incorporating it into their games both as a wall lamp and as a portable lamp.

Tools

Circular Sanding Machine

Vertical Bandsaw

Vacuum-forming Machine

Soldering Iron

Hand Drill

Materials

LDPE (as it is safe for children)

PMMA (Opaque)

In the market, there already exist lamps for children with transparent and colored lampshades. There are also lamps with interchangeable shades.

The innovation that Playlight brings to both types of existing products is the possibility of easy customization by the user and also the ease of changing these lampshades.

Also interesting (and something that is not commonly seen) is a lamp that can be both portable and wall-mounted.

Finally, the most innovative feature is the Playlight's ability to serve as a playing object.

With all that in mind, I took all my thoughts to the page. I spent a couple of hours sketching to try to get a grasp on the general shape as well as usability. I concluded that I wanted a simple geometric shape, as well as interchangeable screens. These could be changed with a simple mechanical system. I didn't want any complex parts with small pieces, as they could hurt children.

The first step was to create 3 different prototypes that would help to get an idea of the dimensions of the product. The first one is made of foam, the second one of cardboard and the third one of aluminum. Using different materials helped to understand the importance of choosing a material that can be used safely as for example the aluminum prototype had very sharp points that could cause damage.

The foam prototype was taken and vacuum-formed with a polyethylene sheet. This sheet was cut with the vertical saw and sanded with the belt sander. At the same time, the frame of the guides was made and assembled with contact glue. Everything was sanded with the circular sander.

Holes were drilled both in the guide piece and in the base and a small hole was also drilled to fit the switch.

The entire base and the whole of the guides were painted 'Violet Blue' and left to dry. The handles were also painted in 'Cadmium Yellow' and left to dry. Once dry, a coat of matte varnish was applied.

All the electronics were made using the battery box from the round battery wall light and soldering it all together with tin to a switch and the LED bulb.

All parts were assembled and the handles (which act as joints) were screwed on.

A step-by-step guide of how to use the changing screens. Children can customise these screens however they want: painting, adding stickers, etc.

In conclusion, this work is very useful as it shows that any industrial design process requires many hours of work both in terms of previous study and formalization of the idea.

On an individual level I feel that this project has really helped me to push myself to try to understand the design object perfectly; something I had never done before in this way. What has stood out to me the most is that if without a market study and a breakdown of the object, my knowledge of the object would not be enough to generate a prototype capable of being commercial.