Hasta La Ideas

The Autodesk Sustainability Workshop is a free and vast online resource that aims to teach sustainability strategies, from micro to macro. The simple, easily-digestible series of strategy videos, tutorials and case studies can help students, educators, designers, engineers and architects not only learn about sustainability, but how to directly apply it.

Core77 asked 5 students to take it for a test spin, investigating the workshop and using Autodesk software to incorporate what they’d learned in a re-design of a commonplace object. In the third installment of our series of Autodesk Sustainability Workshop projects, we look at 21-year-old David Markus (Savannah College of Art and Design, BFA in Industrial Design, Fall 2012) and his net-zero energy lamp inspired by the “Liter of Light” project.

David, tell us about yourself.

I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina before moving to Savannah, Georgia for school. I turned 21 this year.

What made you decide to study industrial design?

I grew up in a pretty technical household; my mother was an engineer and my father was a computer programmer. As a child I was fascinated with taking things apart, though putting them back together generally wasn’t in the plan. These days, however, I love to build things. I’ve turned into a bit of a shop geek, and have spent countless hours making contraptions and toys. Since I enjoy making things, Industrial Design gave me the opportunity to combine a lot of my passions and helps me to explore my ideas.

Where did you decide to study, and why?

After visiting Savannah, the decision was easy. SCAD has some incredible facilities, and Savannah is one of the most unique cities I’ve ever visited. The ID department at SCAD was especially impressive with the amount of digital fabrication equipment students had access to.

What areas of industrial design are you interested in focusing on?

I’ve always loved digital technology, and see it gaining even more importance in the future. Digital fabrication technology and equipment is becoming more and more affordable and sophisticated and I’m interested to see the way it affects design.

Tell us about your project.

The idea was to utilize sustainable manufacturing practices to create a net-zero energy lamp. This is a concept that I’ve had in the back of my head for a while, and it was reignited by a recent article showing used soda bottles being filled with water and installed into houses in third-world countries. The bottles captured a significant amount of light, and I wondered if a more industrial and refined version could be designed. Natural light has always seemed superior to any kind of artificial light, and I wanted to create a system for gathering and dispersing the light into a home or building using flexible fiber optic cable.

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