THE LIVING MUSHROOM LAMP

The Living Mushroom Lamp is a piece that focuses on celebrating the material it is made of. My lamp was featured in the Rhode Island School of Design’s industrial design department gallery in a series of projects around the sustainability of new biodegradable materials coming into the market. The mushroom lamp is meant to be a sustainable furniture piece that stands the test of time by being able to change styles via its easy to install peg system. Scroll below to learn more about its making process and designed system for better product sustainability.

The construction of the main base of the lamp is shown to the right through an exploded view.

The right most picture is a close up of the pegs on the inside of the lamps top that allows for the shades to be changed out for different fads and seasons. The old shade can be recycled as shown in the product cycle graphs below the shades pattern studies gallery!

Construction

SHADE PATTERN STUDIES

To the left is a graph of material components that make up the lamp. The graph shows where each material is acquired and its manufacturing steps

To the right is the product’s lifecycle graph. This is an imagined system for the product to be properly recycled. This recycling system partners with home goods stores with a garden department to properly biodegrade the lampshades in large quantities

Exploration

To the left you will see the material in its original form. It is a mycelium foam grown by the company Ecovative. I performed a series of tests and experiments to see the material qualities.

I found one of the material’s most interesting qualities was its ability to be pressed into a leathery textured sheet. The sheet also had a translucent quality allowing for interesting light patterns to pass through.

I used these sheets to create various patterns for lamp shades to best display its varying capacity for light to pass through.