Interior Architecture Faculty Develop Advanced Lighting Course With $30,000 Nuckolls Grant

Rachel Callahan

Sculptural table luminaires created in a new bespoke lighting course, which was funded by a $30,000 grant from the Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education.

An innovative new course in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design offers students the opportunity to design and produce custom lighting fixtures using cutting-edge 3D printing technology.

For the second time in three years, the Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education awarded the Department of Interior Architecture and Design in the Fay Jones School a $30,000 grant to develop an advanced lighting course.

Jake Tucci and Jinoh Park, both assistant professors of interior architecture and design, are the principal investigators. The funding allowed the investigators to develop and implement Premiumization, Sustainability and Making of Bespoke Lighting, a professional elective offered to upper-level students in the Fay Jones School. The grant also supports the exhibition of student work created in the course. 

The Department of Interior Architecture and Design is one of two programs awarded a $30,000 Nuckolls Fund Grant for 2024. The Nuckolls Fund supports college-level lighting programs that enable students to learn, appreciate and apply the fundamentals of lighting design, and to recognize the achievements of James L. Nuckolls, the late lighting designer and pioneer lighting educator.

"For our faculty to receive this highly competitive grant twice within three years is testament to their innovative and relevant approach to lighting design education," said Carl Matthews, professor and head of the Department of Interior Architecture and Design.

Bespoke lighting consists of custom-made lighting fixtures designed to meet the specific needs of a client or space. While glass is typically used in bespoke lighting fixtures, using 3D printers allows students in the course to undertake the entire planning, design and production process for a fixture.

In addition to encouraging students to take an interest in and pay more attention to the use of lighting in space design, the course promotes the use of eco-friendly manufacturing methods that help reduce carbon emissions, unlike traditional glass manufacturing methods. For the course, students are using a soy-based resin which can be hardened using ultraviolet light as well as a filament made from corn.

While lighting education is important for future interior designers, architects and landscape architects, Tucci and Park said such training at a bachelor's degree level is not too common. Due to the cost of equipment and materials for this style of course, they said the funding was essential to offer this course.

"Lighting is a critical component of the built environment," Tucci said. "You can have a very simple or even bad space completely enhanced with just light. It has the power to transform space, outside of other components."

The Fay Jones School currently offers two other lighting courses. Lighting Systems, a required course for interior architecture students, primarily focuses on lighting systems. Advanced Lighting Professional Elective is an advanced lighting course intended for students who want to investigate lighting design. That elective course was developed in 2022 with a previous Nuckolls Fund Grant.

While those two courses both focus on exploration, interior architecture and architecture students in this new course will make an actual product. By using high-end, cutting-edge technology, students will 3D print functional objects.

Throughout this fall semester, students are working to complete two main projects. The design of a sculptural table luminaire helps students learn new digital modeling techniques, test materials and experiment with light sources. For the second project, a wall-mounted luminaire, students will create a larger bespoke luminaire using 3D printed materials, aiming to capture the essence of a glass fixture.

The course also puts a high emphasis on students' hands-on experience, another aspect that the investigators said is sometimes missing in design education. By helping students develop adaptation and design values, the course explores opportunities to make customized items.

 "They are learning the amount of thought, development process and components in the lighting products. They are seeing first-hand how to make these products that they will eventually specify in their designs," Tucci said. "It helps them understand those products as well as build up a nomenclature and way of communicating about those things."

The grant funded the purchase of six new 3D printers exclusively available to the students in the course. Three of the printers are resin printers capable of printing a wide range of materials, including soft and flexible thermoplastic urethanes (TPU) filaments and ceramics. The other three are high-speed filament-based fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers.

Although students may have some experience creating work with 3D printers from other courses, they are not typically the ones operating the machines. The new printers are in a separate location that students in the course can access whenever Vol Walker Hall is open. Additionally, the grant supplied funding for the materials, meaning students can test their designs without concerns about cost.

This freedom of time and cost allows students to experiment more effectively. And since students are printing out an actual product, Park said this process of trial and error is essential for mastering the product's functions.

"If they need to exchange the lightbulb, they need to think about practical ways while keeping the design sense," Park said. "They need to learn how to handle it, how to use it and how to maintain it."

While students may be more familiar with 3D printing small-scale models, where aspects do not have to function, Tucci said, for this course, students need to design around built parts or built connections. Additionally, students are designing a real product where the various components are represented at full scale.

"We're concerned with multiple parts coming together. We are interacting with tolerances, meaning that you can't have a perfect tolerance or things won't fit," Tucci said. "We are also dealing with trial and error."

Additionally, the course introduces students to how business and design intersect. Throughout the semester, students are developing a brand kit for their lighting fixtures that will identify their design language and establish their distinctive brand identity. Tucci and Park said they have noticed that successful students have the ability to tell stories about their products. Park said this will help students learn the technical aspects of lighting and brand development from a business perspective.

"This is an opportunity to interact or be the in-between for the designer and the marketer," Park said.

Following the completion of the course, Tucci and Park plan to display student work at an interior architecture conference. The work also has been accepted to be shown in the Greenhouse exhibition at the Stockholm Furniture Fair in February 2025 and at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City in May 2025.

In 2022, Tucci and the department received a $30,000 grant from the Nuckolls Fund. That grant was used to develop a lighting course focused on the application of lighting theory and fund it for the first three years. The final run of that studio course will be in the spring 2025 semester.