Process

Sophia Friedfertig and Richard Lourie

We were given a blank sheet of paper and five minutes to come up with 10 ideas.  Then from there is where we got started.  We collabrated as a group and name multiple ideas.

First Idea:  Our first idea was to create a system similar to the Rock Band drums.  But the disk would be seperate and each time you hit them they would light up a different color.

Our idea later transformed into our final.  This is because we realized we did not want to another version of rock band we wanted to create our own.

First iteration:  We were going to use LED lights not strips.  We soon realized that lights were more difficult to mold into the spots we wanted.  After going with the LED strips we decided we were going to cut square holes out for each of the lights.  We realized the square holes blocked the light instead of enhancing it.  We later went onto using circle holes.  This projected the light much better.

Second iteration:  We experimented with a lot of different cone/rim sizes.  Some were short and wide, and others were tall and thin.  In the end we went with tall and thin because it allowed the light to travel up instead of dispursing out to the sides.  We decided to have the cone be made out of mirrored acrylic instead of spray paint or tinfoil.  Tinfoil was not chosen because it crinkled and did not reflect like we would have hoped.  Spray Paint worked nicely as it was smooth on the surface but did not reflect much.  Spray paint more absorbed the light.

Third iteration (Final):   We used an acrylic board to hold the LED strip lights.  We also created a box to hold all the wiring in to make a more professional look.  We placed black felt behind the acrylic mirror in order to allow the mirrow to bend into a cone shape like we planned.