Case study: Alphabet Focus
RED DOT and iF Award winner
Alphabet Focus is without doubt, the most complex product range I have had the pleasure of working on. The brief was to design a modular downlight / adjustable downlight with the ability to easily manipulate the beam angle while insuring UGR 19 compliance. The product should be easy to assemble, disassemble and maintain. Oh, and the design has to be 'filigran/delicate' to ensure the least amount of material used. Not to mention the 50W actively cooled version!
The ceiling mount frame is still the base that all new Wila products are built upon. Not bad for a design that was conceptualised in 2012!
WILA alphabet focus - adjustable spotlight
Case Study: PLA Pendant
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Winner of the 2023 Circular Lighting Live "Dragons' Den"
The development of the PLA Pendant was the result of a collaboration between MATT BLACK and LumiAdd.
Visit LumiAdd.com to discover more about their 3D printed lighting products and processes.
MATT BLACK aimed to simplify the construction methodology typically used in architectural pendant luminaires. For those unfamiliar, a pendant luminaire is usually made from a fabricated chassis that contains the electronics, all enclosed within an aluminum extruded profile. While these extruded profiles are relatively modular, the sheet metal chassis is not as flexible. Additionally, shipping extruded tubes often means you're also shipping a lot of air.
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The initial solution was to die-cast one half of the housing and use two identical components to sandwich the electronics in between. This would not only make assembly significantly easier - since it provides full access to the product’s internals - but also reduces transportation costs. Two halve housings stacked together occupy less space than a tube with the same outer diameter. However, the die-casting approach wasn’t modular due to its fixed size, and components would still likely need to be shipped from China.
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We needed a more circular solution and the answer lay in the prototypes we had created - 3D printing!
By switching to 3D printing, we were able to simplify the assembly process even further and create a design that was 100% modular, using only a very small number of non-3D-printed components.โโ
Case study: Xenomorph
Build Back Better Gold Award winner
Inspired by all the talk around modularity and the circular economy, we were curious to see what would be the outcome if instead of creating a plethora of modular products, we just focussed on the main runners therefore reducing complexity.
We opted to run with a round downlight with cut-out size of 120mm to fit a ceiling thickness of 12.5 mm. If a solution for a 25mm ceiling thickness is required, we can simply machine the heatsink to accommodate this.
The thermal management system also holds the product in the ceiling, no springs here saving component costs and assembly time. The heatsink is also stackable, saving space and costs when being shipped.
The light source, lens and control system are from Optoga, meaning there is no external driver along with all the cables and other components that go along with it.
This concept was presented during a webinar run by Recolight. If you wish know more about the finer details, please watch the webinar below. The presentation starts at 27:22
