Florascence is a light-modifying device inspired by the iris. Pull a cord and it blooms open or closes shut like the petals of a flower, controlling how much light enters a room. It's a mechanical alternative to the ordinary switch or dimmer. The same everyday act becomes something expressive, and the low-effort pull makes it easy for a wide range of people to operate.

Underneath the bloom, the machine turns rotary input into an oscillating output through a chain of mechanisms. An offset weight on an escapement generates torque that spins a shaft. A belt-and-pulley carries that motion to a second shaft turning three cams, and cam followers translate it into the linear motion that drives the petal linkages open and shut.

I was project and design lead on a team of seven for this ME 102 build. Beyond steering the project, I designed the flower and its blooming mechanism, the cattail switch, and the rippling lily-pad forms that give the piece its character.

As project and design lead, my hardest problem wasn't a single part. It was keeping a team of seven moving in one direction. Coordinating the work meant balancing competing creative directions and holding the aesthetic vision together while people pulled toward different mechanical solutions. I had to make decisions that kept everyone unblocked without flattening what each person brought to the build.

On the mechanical side, the core challenge was converting a single gravity-driven input into synchronized, repeatable blooming across multiple petals. Our first full-system prototype integrated the actuator, power source, and frame, but the motion was inconsistent. The rotary-to-rotary transmission from the weight to the cam-follower system was overly complex, poorly aligned, and unstable through the actuation cycle.

We worked within laser-cut and 3D-printed parts, tight tolerances on the linkage joints, and a fixed course timeline. That made the key decisions clear. Simplify the motion path, regulate the torque input, and design the bloom geometry so it could open and close smoothly without stalling at dead points.

We started from a desk-lamp concept with a blooming iris and worked it through rounds of mapping, educing, disrupting, and gestalting. Each pass questioned the interaction until we landed on a user-driven open-close bloom rather than a continuous dimmer. Early cardboard prototypes tested a gravity-driven pulley driving reciprocating linkages, and a “floating iris” idea that ended up shaping the final structure. Committing to a central ring with linkage-driven petals was the turning point that set the foundation for everything after.

I designed the flower and the mechanism that makes it bloom. That meant the petal geometry and the linkage layout that translate one linear input into synchronized motion across every petal. As the design matured I also modeled the pieces that give Florascence its identity: the cattail switch that acts as the actuator, and the rippling lily-pad forms and flower carvings that lean into the “flora” in the name.

When the first full build proved unreliable, we redesigned the motion path directly from the analysis. We swapped the cam-follower assembly for a scotch yoke to get smoother rotary-to-linear conversion, added an escapement to regulate torque from the weight-and-counterweight system, and refined the linkage bloom to cut dead points. FEA and free-body analysis drove a leaner, stronger frame, trimming excess material and reinforcing the side supports and lily-pad base. From there we scaled from a single test flower up to the final three-flower machine.

Ideation sketches from the project. Each round moves through four lenses: mapping, disrupting, educing, and gestalting, carrying the idea from a projector's iris diaphragm toward a blooming, light-shaping flower.