During my studies, I spent a semester at the Department of Industrial Design, at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands. During this semester my main project was the Lumio desk lamp, which was developed with my two team members Thomas van Hemert and Hongyu Wang. As a part of the Interactive Lighting squad, we set out to develop an interface, which should help employees adjust and control the light setting in an open office environment.

Via an iterative design process, we ended up with the prototype displayed in the header photo, which enabled the user to adjust brightness and color temperature of the nearby lighting. This means that the setting could be used on the Lumio lamp itself, while Lumio also acted as a wireless control panel for the ceiling light system in the office.

To adjust the brightness, you simply blocked out the desired amount of light from the lamp, by moving your hand in front of the lamp face itself. For the color temperature we added a thermostat-like rotating button in the base of the lamp, that both acted as the control for the color temperature, but also as a preview of the general light setting. When the desired setting was found, one quick press on the thermostat button would set the lighting on the lamp itself, and a long press would send the setting to the ceiling lamps.

This and a few other visionary features are showcased in the following video:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At this point in the process we made a 180 and killed our darling, because of various interaction challenges. We had an almost fully functioning prototype, which used 6 ping sensors to measure hand motion. Unfortunately we were not fully satisfied with the result, so we decided to give the concept another go, which ended up being the final concept. This concept is shown below.