Luke Firth Personal Development Plan 3

7/29/2019 Luke Firth Personal Development Plan 3

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Personal Development Plan 3Luke Anthony Firth

1011091

March 2013

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Involved With Since Last PDP

In Work

My main areas of work whilst at Aktiva over the past few months have been mainly focused around two roles -

rstly to develop a new LED pendant to add to the Aktiva catalogue and secondly to work closely with clients

to produce a lighting scheme using our ttings that best ts their needs through photometric studies.

The major work I have been involved in is the development of a new LED pendant for Aktiva - collecting and

photometrically testing samples of new materials designed for high even light diffusion through edge lighting with

minimal transmission loss and developing possible housing options.

Also I have been involved in liaising with clients to help them determine their nal lighting specications through

photometric modelling of different scenarios for their projects using DIALUX then producing documentation

and instruction sheets detailing xing centres etc for the chosen setups. If required the scenarios would be ran

through the LED/Fluorescent economy calculator I created earlier this year which details how long in years itwould take an LED scenario to recoup its higher initial cost through the energy saved.

Outside Of Work

After identifying my sketching as an area I would really like to improve upon, I have bought a roll of A3 paper on

which I try to spend at least 30 mins every day sketching one or more products and dating them so that I can

easily look back and see any incremental improvements. Doing this has helped with motivating me to pursue my

personal projects better and in February a personal project of mine of rebuilding my broken old speakers was

featured in some design blogs. This project is still undergoing whilst now I am dealing with quotes to complete

the necessary work that forms part of the project that requires specialist tooling. As well as this, I have been usingillustrator to turn some of the icons I have sketched into vectors and uploaded them to thenounproject.com - an

open source website dedicated to iconography. From here my icons have been used for presentations by the

state of Dallas local government on recycling1, an app/website about trust funds and a economic presentation

by USfunds2.

• Developing a new pendant LED tting.

• Trialling new materials and methods for achieving even dispersion of light from an

indirect linear LED light source.

• Monitoring the assembly and manufacture of new B Line LED product and updating

the assembly manual and instruction sheets to reect any changes in methodology.

• Completing photometric studies and liaising with clients on lighting specications.

• Creating and maintaining a Fluorescent/LED Economy calculator.

• Daily sketch practice.

• Had a personal project featured on a number of design blogs.

• Started to organise work into a portfolio/blog ready format.

• Now a member of both the Society of Light and Lighting and CIBSE.

• Had a number of my icons used in professional presentations by others.









Thank you

Action Planning At work:

• Prepare for and make a real push to get all of the work done for the bespoke project completed both

quickly and correctly to give the project a higher chance of going through and being given the go ahead.

• Continue thorough thermal testing of Aktiva LED ttings under different circumstances in order to get

a better impression of what affects heat sinking within actual applications so I can make better informeddecisions about the design of the products I am currently working on.

• Now that Aktiva has already started to receive applications for the next years placement students, I

have been asked by my senior designer to organise parts of my work and any research into such a way

that I can hand over to my replacement in such a way that they can pick up where I left off.

At home:

• Keep up my daily sketching practice in order to try and improve, whilst now adding in handwriting

practice to the routine too.

• Get my house in order, in terms of design. As noted in the tables, a big clean up and organisation of my

work is well overdue.

Keyshot Render of Ecko speaker

design.

Photometrics work screenshot

for London Library Project at

work.

Partial collection of icons created

for The Noun Project5.

Notes Since PDP 2

• I had expected that after almost 8 months at Aktiva, work would settle somewhat into a routine. I have

realised however that this is not the case at all as the bespoke nature of the products that Aktiva as a

company produces means that the time of the design team is largely taken up by adapting our products

to t exactly what the client needs within constraints and reacting to often a high number of changes in

brief.

• I had also underestimated the power of specic jobs over the design process. Numerous products have

been completely designed at Aktiva but often will be stored and wait for a large enough number in one

or more orders to justify a complete manufacturing run.

Documents

Luke Firth Personal Development Plan 3