Final Year Project Showcase

The team presents, Aurora Beam!

This is how we imagined our installation to look like, to scale at night. Set along the Singapore River on the grassy Promontory @ Marina Bay, Aurora Beam is deliberately placed so that it does not take up the whole space, such that friends, families, or couples may still sit and wind down on the grass patch. It also serves to provide photo opportunities for the audience to enjoy as they sit through the chill night!

Aurora Beam was a direct inspiration of the term Aurora Borealis also known as the Northern Lights. This photo displayed an aspect of our experimentation stage. Upon experimenting with the different texture that could be produced, the final outcome intrigued us and ignited the idea of including the iconic Northern Lights and its symbolism into our final year project design.

Here we have our choice of lights- LED lights, in the colour red and teal. These energy-saving lights are in the chosen complementary colours as we want to create contrast with the vibrancy it brings within the coolness of the night at our location, The Promontory @ Marina Bay.

In order to ensure that our final installation is stable, we applied the necessary procedures and things that we learnt during the prototyping process. This includes tackling the potential threats that could jeopardise its stability, made some changes to the design to make it seamless and experiment with different materials.

However, the experimentation doesn’t stop there, as shown in this photo. Where we experiment with possible adhesive methods such as using tapes and nylon strings to mold its shape better.

After countless experiments, we concluded that a hot glue gun would be the most ideal option for the adhesive method. This photo displayed us hot gluing the different points of the structure that are crucial in forming the stability of the prototype. We also made use of the tapes as a temporary adhesive method which we removed once the structure is stabled.

Once the skeleton had been hot glued, it was time for a retouch! We touched up unfinished gaps and smoothened the hot glue residues’ surfaces for a cleaner and appealing visual. It's imperative that the process was done gently and accurately to prevent any unwanted circumstances from happening. This process also played a crucial role as the prototype needed a strong foundation before we could start adding the other aesthetic elements.

This is essentially the skeleton of our installation, without the pretty lights nor the exterior and interior reflective materials. Made from aluminium rods each bent specially by hand and put together with hot glue, this stage is where you can start to see the shape of our installation taking form.

As we’ve secured the skeleton, It was time to enhance the aesthetics of the installation by adding the cellophane paper and LED lights. Based on our resources, we experimented with the position of the LED lights based on the project’s artistic direction before we could proceed with the final interior and exterior design. We also added grass patches for a better visualisation of the actual installation.

By now our installation is pretty much set in stone. You can see the texture interior done with different metal sheets and cellophane paper, together with the LED strips lined around it. To give a better visualisation of what our installation would look like in real life, we created a scaled model of a human to emulate the size of real life humans!

This is just one of the few examples where we tested out the way our lights would look on different textures. For this photo specifically, it is to emulate how the light design and the aluminium sheet would look like in real life. This is a way for us to further visualise if it is aesthetic or “instagrammable” as we wanted it to be.

This is a short clip of the construction of Aurora Beam!