LumiruAn industrial product inspired by snow

The purpose of the Lumiru project is to find something familiar from my own background and use it as an inspira-tion and stepping stone for an industrially manufactured product.

Introduction

Since I am a foreign student in Japan hailing from the northern parts of Europe, Finland, I believe I have a different kind of a relationship with nature than my Japanese counterparts. Finland is a country of bright summers when the sun never sets, and on the other hand the winters of my home country are extremely cold and dark. This is especially true when consider-ing the part called the Lapland, the area north of the Arctic Circle. This happens to be exactly the region of Finland where I come from. Its a region where one has to walk no more than 10 minutes in order to find vast wilderness around them. Thanks to the nature being ever present, the dark and cold winters with a very lim-ited visibility become almost magical. This is because there exists a natural element that aids people living in these crude surroundings.

Snow is this subject in question. It is an element that has the ability to reflect light very efficiently. In fact snow can reflect light to that extent that in northern Finland the risk of burning your skin because of sun-light is much more severe during the first sunny days of spring than in the summer. The snow’s function as a lighting becomes even more clear in the dark months of the deep winter, when mostly the only source of light are the stars and the moon.

The snow amplifies the light of the moon, stars and even auroras painting the landscape blue or in the case of auroras green. The light is never actually bright or even clearly visible, but rather gloomy. It cannot be compared to daylight conditions, but when walking in the wilderness it becomes easier to observe surround-ings.

In addition to the function as a lighting element the snow has the ability to sculpt environment and make the invisible visible. As snow falls it tends to stick to the branches of trees and make them look completely different from what one can see in a forest in the sum-mer time. The shapes snow creates are very soft and cushion-like. These soft shapes are however often contrasted with the sharp edges that the wind in turn sculpts from the snow. Snowy landscape is often a very relaxing and comfortable sight and as such can provide a lot of inspirations for design projects. Snow becomes especially relevant when considering whole interior solutions or a variety of installations.

The third very interesting attribute of snow is the abil-ity to make wind visible, much in the same manner as for example sand or other fine material of the same sort. As already mentioned snowy landscape is con-stantly affected by wind. Snow has the ability to record the movement of air and the shapes will remain on the surface of snowy plains for quite some time. In addi-tion to that very light snow especially in low tempera-tures tends to float and fly with the wind creating small clouds close to the ground.

There are also a few other aspects of snow that I tried to keep in mind when proceeding with this project. Those being the fact that snow is a very haptic mate-rial that has a very unique feel to it, one can shape it in their hands as well as feel the coldness of it easily. The other one being the possibility to use snow as an insulation the way numerous plants and small animals do during the cold winter.

Method

As the project theme was very personal for me and there wasn’t exactly any real problem to be solved unlike in a common project where the problems to be solved are listed in the brief, the design process became sort of a journey for me. Since this was the first time for me to try and design something based on personal experiences, translating those experiences in to something coherent wasn’t easy. For this reason the method used to find the final solution is not exactly easily explained either. Basically much of the work that had to be done was just plain thinking and orga-nizing my own thoughts about the subject and task at hand. Since it was not clear at any given point what kind of product I was hoping to present as the final so-lution the process was a lot of waltzing back and forth. Even though in the end I decided to go forward with one of the very first ideas I got in this project, I had to walk a long way to get back to that one good idea. During the process I went from trying to recreate the haptic attributes of snow to using only the visual world of snow as the stepping stone for creating a working concept. At the time in the project when I was in-trigued especially by the haptic side of snow I did quite a few tests with different materials and found myself having somewhat of a DIY approach to designing a product. I was trying to find an interesting material solution that would be beautiful and interesting in itself rather than trying to find functions for it. But as I found myself drawn back to the original idea of combining the different types of visual attributes of snow I could also start thinking about possible needs for the product. Would I be more interested in updating an existing product and style it differently or should I rather aim for creating something new or at least combining some product categories in to a new one. The shapes of snow are interesting in one particular way, they are ever changing. As the shapes don’t ever remain the same they are able to provide surprising moments when observing one’s surroundings. I also wanted to find a way to make the contrast be-tween having snow and not having snow visible and use the image of those two situations as a metaphor for an ON/OFF function. This metaphor felt like it could be naturally connected to one of the attributes of snow earlier explained in this document - the function to make air or rather wind visible. This thought of train led me to finding ways of using wind in itself as a part of the end product. This meant that I wanted to find a way to make wind interact with the designed item in

some sense much like a mobile or a wind bell. Since lighting was already considered as a possible function that I wanted to study further, the product category itself started to pan out quite clearly. At this point I was preparing to create some sort of lighting system that would interact with its surroundings and change the atmosphere of the space it would be applied to. Instead of going with a mobile-like passive lighting object I wanted to opt for a more functional product that’s absolute value wouldn’t be just the styling of it. So as I ventured further with the idea of using wind as a design element it became more clear to myself that i wanted to use wind in some functional way. I wanted to find a way for the product to manipulate the wind rather than the other way around. I started to remind myself about the attributes of snow and came across with the ability to change the atmo-sphere of a space as well as the temperature. I listed exiting products that are able to change temperatures of spaces or at least make people feel cooler/warmer. This opened two new directions for me, one being the possibility of air conditioning and air circulation and the other one being the insulating effect of snow. Since wind was already considered as an interesting point I soon opted for the manipulation of airflow. Even though I first tried to find ways to redesign the con-ventional air conditioners it was clear to me that the end product should be a simple machine that wouldn’t bring the positive feelings that only snow can create with a high price. Instead I wanted to find a way to improve the products of the cheaper price range. As such electric fans became an interesting target to bring something new to in order to make them feel more humane and soften the image of these very mechanic products.

A simple floor fan is designed to look mechanical.

A fan of snow

Now that I had a clear product category and a vision of the end product in mind I could start the “real” design process. The idea of using the air flow that these prod-ucts produce as a visible element was obvious to me from the beginning. By studying how the wind actu-ally creates changing soft forms when hitting different types of materials I came up with the idea of using canvas as a lamp shade that would be erected by the wind generated with a basic electric fan. The very first prototypes of the canvas hood worked brilliantly, but since they were of closed shape they would capture the wind and not cool the rest of the room. From this point on the design process became very much of the type of try and error and then try some more. The ideas for the shape of the product concept I had created with 3d CAD were merely uneducated guesses and working with the prototype was as ex-pected quite tricky. The fan’s air intake and the wind created by it varied a lot when changing even small nuances in the design of the base part of the product. Once the correct type of canvas was found and the size of the air intake vents started to look as if they would work I opted to make the top of the canvas hood open allowing it to become a kind of an air tunnel that would move the air efficiently upwards.

As the shape of the product became a very vertical design it was clear that the wind would blow straight upwards. This feature didn’t come by accident how-ever as I searched for as much information as possible about the different type of fans and their functions and strong and weak points. Even though I wanted to make a compact floor fan sized product I was intrigued by the way how well a ceiling fan actually functions. Unlike the smaller horizontally blowing floor and desk fans the ceiling fan makes the whole air mass of the room rotate and thus allows a natural air flow within a space. This means that the warm air from the top of the room is mixed with the cooler air at the bottom. Even though the actual temperature of the room doesn’t change the wind that is generated makes the space feel more comfortable.

Inspiraton from ceiling fans

An interesting point with the ceiling fans is that it can be used for both, cooling and warming up spaces by changing the direction of the wings’ rotation. In the first setting the ceiling fan pushes the air from the top of the space downwards in the middle of the

The first setting of ceiling fan pushes air.

The second setting of ceiling fan sucks air.

room. This creates a cooling effect as wind is blow-ing constantly from the middle towards the edges. The reason why this makes us feel cooler is because of the warm air from near by the ceiling is pushed down and at the same time the cooler air from the floor is being moved upwards at the edges of the room. As the rota-tion becomes constant the air mass gets mixed and the temperature of the room stabilizes. This effect makes people feel cooler in the hot summer weather and vice versa warmer during the cold months of winter. As mentioned when cooling a room the fan blows air downwards in the middle of the room, because people tend to spend time mostly in the center parts of a space. Thus the wind is the strongest where the people stay.

The second setting of a ceiling fan creates a suction that moves cool air upwards from the middle of the room. When the cool air from the floor level is moved up the warm air from the top is naturally being pushed down at the edges of the room. This effect of slowly moving warm air downwards makes people feel warmer at the bottom of a space. And as the wind is not strong at the center of the room, people don’t feel the cooling effect of the air masses moving around.

The effect of a ceiling fan can also be created with a small floor fan. To do this a floor fan should be placed in a corner of a room and aimed straight upwards. This creates the same type of a natural air flow as a ceil-ing fan causes. This trick seems to be a quite common way to adjust the temperature of a room slightly or just rotate the air efficiently. Instructions for using an elec-tric fan this way can be found on numerous DIY web sites. The difference with a ceiling fan is of course the power that the machine produces. A ceiling fan works commonly best in higher spaces creating a quite slow airflow. The smaller floor fan however is best used in lower rooms to create a more rapid airflow. The floor fan cools down a small room very efficiently when us-

ing it this way.

From the beginning I was expecting to find tricks on DIY web sites how to use fans in new ways to create better airflow, but I didn’t expect to get same type of solutions for both warming up and cooling down a space. According to the instructions I found it seems that a small space can be made feel warmer by aim-ing the fan upwards the exact same way as one would when hoping for a cooling effect. I have used my own floor fan in my apartment this way the whole begin-ning of the hot summer and haven’t had any need to use the air conditioner yet. One thing i didn’t have a chance to try though was the warming effect during the cooler time periods.

So a floor fan can perform the same way as a ceiling fan if it is powerful enough and the room not too big. And since the fan should be located in a corner of a room it doesn’t create that uncomfortable airflow to the middle of the space, but rather creates a wind blowing softly towards the fan itself. If a simple solution such as this has been common knowledge for a long time I could but wonder why this type of fans don’t exist in the markets. As expected some of the small floor fans can be aimed to different directions but very often these fans are used to blow wind straight towards the people in the need of cooling.

I now had an idea of a product that would solve some concrete problems as well as would be inspired by the concept of snow. Even though Lumiru doesn’t solve a problem in a way that it makes its competitors irrel-evant I consider it as a concept that tries to break the way how things are commonly done. By designing a product such as an electric fan from a very personal and emotional point of view the focus of what people look in it changes. Also the function is clearly different than a normal desk fan since the expectation is to cool down spaces rather than people.

With Lumiru I want to make people think of the low end products’ value from other perspectives than just functionality. The way electric fans are commonly de-signed and especially styled is based on efficiency and functionality with little consideration about the overall feeling of a space it is meant to fit in. An air circulator does exactly what the name suggests, it makes the air move around. This is a function that users can experi-ence haptically as well as by hearing sound of the fan. This concept was made to change that by adding a visual way of understanding air movement.

Self evaluation

Lumiru as a product does open some new doors and is a fruit of critical thinking about today’s mass manu-factured low end electronics. I do believe that even the cheapest products in our homes and everyday lives can be redesigned and the way they are used reconsidered. When talking about redesigning something I don’t mean the usual face lifting and restyling, but rather a more intuitive update that ideally tells a story. But in order to come up with a design that withholds an inter-esting and self explanatory tale, designers need to start the design process from some very strong image that people can relate to. As I mentioned in the process ex-planation I made it clear to myself that in this project I

wish to challenge myself and try to make a project that may not have any real purpose to start with. I expected the story behind the product to start living its own life and somehow make the design explain itself to me. Lumiru is the first project I have ever done that follows the path of this kind of a design method.

The final styling of the product looks good but might have some trouble however. Some of the problems with the final shape include the uncertainty of some proportions’ effects on the airflow. Even though a working prototype was made in order to understand the functionality of the product the final shape designed in 3d CAD software is nothing but an somewhat educated guess. This also means that even though I already opted for two relatively small sizes of the canvas hoods there might be a possibility to make them grow higher once proper testing with proper components took place.

Design doesn’t always just answer questions, it can sometimes even redefine the questions asked. In some sense I would like to believe that Lumiru project suc-ceeds in affecting the questions revolving around low end home electronics.