The Origami Lampshade
Designed and developped in Fab Lab Wgtn

Furniture & house
Design
Inspired from Robert J. Lang’s CamphorPot8, opus 679 origami pattern, this Lampshade was created in Dubaï by Wendy Neale, while working at Fab Lab UAE. It was then adapted in Wellington by Etienne Moreau (Fab Lab Wgtn) to help anyone custom their own Lampshades & run workshops!
The lamp’s story is a great illustration of what we can make & achieve in an open design world with shared digital fabrication spaces all around the world available to anyone!
Technologies used
Laser cutting Vector DrawingMachines & tools used
Laser cutter ILS12.150D UniversalFiles in the GitHub link (the black cat icon)
- a Lampshade template in .ai and .dxf format to make your custom design
- the Materials list, settings & machine specs
- a Workshop Runsheet to run your own Lampshade workshop
- the Instructions to hand out to participants attending the workshop
- Fab Lab Wgtn’s Lampshade ready-to-cut sample in .ai and .dxf format
- others custom designs we made at Fab Lab Wgtn in .ai and .dxf format
Machine & software used
To create our lamps, we only used:
- a laser cutter (machine/process available in many Fab Labs - ours is a ILS12.150D Universal, powered with a 105W laser unit, with a bed-size of 1219.2x609.7mmm)
- Adobe Illustrator vector drawing software (a good free & open source alternative is Inkscape!)
Materials recommended
So far, we made great lampshades out of:
- 0.6mm polypropylene (the white model) or 0.35mm colored craft paper (the dark blue model)
- and 3mm acrylic (for the light socket fitting)
Workshop layout - create a “2-hour make your own lampshade”
- License - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
- original design - Wendy Neale, based on an existing pattern by R. J. Lang
- workshop creators - Wendy Neale & Etienne Moreau (Fab Lab Wgtn)
- creation date - May 2018
- workshop type - hands-on workshop, 2 hours
- advised number of participants - 6
- machine needed - laser cutter with at least a 500x500mm bed
- software needed - vector drawing software like Inkscape or Illustrator
- suggested materials - for each lamp, a 500x500mm piece of 0.6mm white polypropylene or 0.35mm colored paper + a 85x80mm piece of 3mm acrylic