An Illuminated History of Light

My capstone was an interactive pop up book recording a brief and selective history of artificial lighting. I wanted to combine paper engineering techniques with circuits, and one of my favorite subjects: lights. For me, artificial lighting and its effect on urban development was a really interesting topic, and I decided to pick 8 lighting inventions to make up this book.

My research process consisted of images from collectors, old street photos, and diagrams. I also read encyclopedias, news articles, as well as patents, and writings of the inventors themselves. I then moved onto prototyping the circuits on thin paper, and a second round of prototyping on thicker paper after I finished designing the graphics.