Materials used: sheet acrylic, composite board, plastic enamel, screws, wall-mount bulb

There’s more after the jump!

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The irony of dorm furniture is that, while it’s marketed as reflecting a unique personal style, everyone ends up owning the same thing. Squeaky inflatable couches, ubiquitous wall-mounted lights in the celestial shapes… dorm furniture’s quirky style pretty much got diluted by mass consumerism. So then I got an idea of designing a DIY wall light kit.

“Doids” are basic in construction, in installation, and in personalization. It starts by making odd-shaped rings out of composite 1/2″ thick wood boards. A sheet of acrylic is cut and secured to the underside of the ring with a heavy-duty stapler. The whole thing is placed over a very high heat source (in this case, vacuum mold machine) with the unstapled side facing down. The heat slowly softens the plastic and gravity pulls it down with uniform force, resulting in a perfectly smooth convex shape. Each Doid then gets assigned a personality and its own story through the magic of black enamel paint. I actually got the idea of naming these “Doids” because the first one I made was the “Bitteroid” that share a similar shape to the cardiod, a curve that can be produced as the path of a point on the circumference of a circle as that circle rolls around another fixed circle with the same radius. Math rocks hard!

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