Jimmy Wang | Industrial Design Portfolio

SIALOS is a modular desk lamp with multi-axis control and adaptive light tones to reduce children’s eye fatigue during nighttime study.

1. RESEARCH

Childhood myopia is rising in the U.S., with diagnosed cases increasing from "6.75% in 2016" to "7.24% in 2019."

-National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Myopia: Causes, Prevention, and Treatment of an Increasingly Common Disease, 2024.

"Parents choose the products, but children live with the experience.

When design overlooks children’s real behaviors, safety and comfort risks can go unseen."

— “Child Safety in the Smart Home,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2021.

PAIN POINTS

DESIGN STATEMENT

Visual Discomfort

Study Pressure

Silent Discomfort

≈7.24%

≈35.22%

100%

Children ages 0 - 17 affected by myopia by 2026

ESTIMATED PREVALENCE

1 in 14

United States

7.24%

35.22%

Children ages 0 - 17 affected by myopia by 2026

1 in 3

ESTIMATED PREVALENCE

East Asia

100%

Year

Designer

Tools Used

2026.

Jan.

6 Weeks

Jimmy Wang

2. PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

With a better understanding of design features, I developed an understanding of the project’s mechanical and visual direction through the mood board. I studied mechanisms, assembly details, and texture references to guide both function and design language. With problem insights in mind, the next step is to sketch, iterate, and validate decisions through use.

I tested three existing study lamps through a writing task to compare comfort, glare, shadows, adjustability, and interaction. If these issues caused discomfort for an adult, they may affect children even more. Thus, the testing phase is essential for defining what SIALOS should keep, improve, or rethink before material testing, sketching, and prototype validation.

Clip-On Lamp

Flexible Arm Lamp

Wide Light Bar Lamp

Compactness is valuable, but SIALOS needs a more secure structure and locking system.

SIALOS should offer adjustability with controlled, lockable positions.

SIALOS should maintain wide, soft illumination while improving directional control and adaptive tone.

Rapid sketch iterations helped me break down structural details from visual references and translate them into a focused form language for the project. The next step is to select key mechanisms and prototype them to test scale, handling, and user feel.

TEXTURE EXPLORATIONS

INTEGRATION

IDEA SKETCH

MOOD BOARD

USER TESTING

Texture Behavior Translation

Subtle noise bumps give the shell soft tactile without making the lamp feel visually heavy.

Woven cable texture makes the electrical component feel softer, safer, and more child-friendly.

Circular cut texture helps users locate and turn the lock wheel to secure or release the extension pole.

Triangular texture provides a clear holding point and added resistance during rotation.

Repetitive circle cuts make the 4-tone switch easier to read through touch and motion.

Hatched slider texture helps children quickly find and adjust the ON/OFF control by touch.

PROTOTYPING

Drawing to Prototype Translations

I 3D-printed small-scale mechanical parts to translate insights from user testing, mood board takeaways, and rapid sketching into physical tests of structure, movement, and handling. I produced high-fidelity prototypes within a short timeframe, using 1/6-scale prints to refine tolerances, dimensions, and detail resolutions before moving toward the final model.

From Mechanism Studies to Working Prototype
Assembly + Interactions

This full-scale prototype helped me move from testing individual mechanisms to understanding SIALOS as a complete product, revealing how movement, assembly, proportion, and interaction perform together at real scale.

3. PROTOTYPE MANUFACTURE

Working with manufacturers gave me hands-on experience through communication, decision making, and material studies.