INDN 311: Bottle Form & Enclosure Elimination

After hustling and talking to my tutor about the project, we both decided that removing the exterior entirely was a much better option to pursue for this project. By removing the exterior, the workings between the digital device and the analogue lensing mechanism are laid bare, and the phone is allowed to highlight it's own beauty. Because, let's admit it, the iPhone is a very beautiful device.

Keeping the aesthetic though, I really want to expand on the concept of the designed bottle to make it something that both served as an extremely functional element, as well as being emblematic of the lens I was trying to make it. To make the bottle a diverging lens, I had to make sure that the bottom of the bottle was a one-sided concave lens. This would refract the light out when I sent the light from the phone through it, as well as "weakening" it, ensuring it wouldn't make the ceiling too bright.

I looked at various variations on the form, in particular the idea of faceting the form cylindrically. These sketches then formed the basis for my experimental forays into modelling the bottles in Solidworks.

The glass bottles all have different qualities and different benefits. The various iterations ultimately resulted in the bottle on the far right. This one I felt to be the best expression of the lens form that I wanted to achieve as well as the one that people would recognise. Usually a lens shape like that however would be a magnifying lens, but in this instance it's actually been manipulated to have the opposite effect. By having the concave lens in the bottom of the bottle and the top of the bottle just a thin constant thickness of glass, it should eliminate any focusing elements.

This is an example of how said bottle might look on the screen of the phone. The lighting isn't exactly what the real lighting would look like, but it is as close as I could get it until my rendering skills improve.

I've gotten the bottle form off to the glassblower, and hopefully I will hear back from him soon as to how the project turned out.