Based mainly upon research with materials and light-weight structure; this project touched on the work of Frei Otto-- with his method of drawing geometry from existing natural phenomena ie. a soap bubble cluster. He would project light through the translucent film of the bubbles on to a wall and then translated the projection into plans for nonbuilding structures. He called this type of form discovery, material computation.
With the idea of using LED beach balls as building material for a lighting fixture, I began by looking into sphere clusters and sphere packing methods for formal direction. I came upon research on spherical microbial particles suspended in a liquid, referred to as colloidal particles. The study focused on how these spherical particles (about a nanometer in size) would cluster together when held in a bead of water.
After finding form from these clusters, I began constructing a nylon webbing harness system that would act as the the bead of water holding the beach balls together like the colloids.
The result from this research based project became a life-sized interpretation of the colloidal cluster that provides an ambient light, somber in appearance and subtle enough to look at directly.
