Parametric Lamp Design

This week I made a 3D printed lamp shade inspired by paper lamps!

I knew I wanted to design a lamp shade that would fit over the existing base I had, which is simply a lightbulb screwed into a plastic circle with clips to attach the shade with tension. I wanted to make something with curves, and found inspiration from other 3D printed lamps which looked like they made use of sine waves for the design (see https://wooj.design/products/lamp). I soon found other lamps made of paper that had similar shapes but seemed more organic than the 3D printed plastic ones, like these handmade lamps in the shape of flowers: https://www.vraimentbeau.com/en/shop/children/children-lighting/large-table-lamp-clochette-ouverte-charlot-et-cie-18100127/. I wanted to see if I could achieve a similarly organic and slightly crumpled looking lampshade with 3D printing.

I decided to create a circular design composed of vertical sine waves with some randomness in Grasshopper. For variables, I included the desired height and radius of the lamp, how many sine waves should be generated around the circumference of the lamp, how many steps over the height of the lamp should be calculated, the peak height for each sine wave, and the level of randomness. With the randomness set to zero, a perfectly sinusoidal lamp is generated. With randomness set to one, a chaotic lamp is generated which retains some curves but doesn't read as sinusoidal. By playing with each parameter, I found a shape I liked.

I exported my desired shape as an STL file to be printed. In the Cura software, I selected "spiralize mode" to print only the shell of the design and not fill in the middle. From there, it was able to be sliced and 3D printed. See my files linked here, as Instructables has a file size limit:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14IJpEZ8ZQlJ9qNpuJzFcCLkagduQPzdt?usp=share_link