Dan McMahon



Designer and maker. Lover of: pinball machines, the desert, materials,  human scale, two-wheeled vehicles, fabrication processes, trees, magic, coffee, forks, water, desserts, chinatown, t-shirts, small boats, raspberries, campfires, keychains, jazz, trout, flowers, cannoli, free museums, glossy paint, fireworks, movies on big screens, wood things, rituals, kind people, glass bottles, birds, iron nails, the circusBased in Brooklyn, NY


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Paper Experiments

During the design process of a cast-resin lamp shade, the associated technical challenges coupled with a sense of guilt over a somewhat flippant choice in material gave way to what is now an ongoing investigation into creating self supporting paper structures that are also thin enough to diffuse light.

When paper pulp dries out, the plant fibers form strong bonds with one another and the resulting matrix shrinks, sometimes down to 50%. By using armatures and forms to selectively resist that shrinking, the resulting tension can be leveraged to create structural forms out of impossibly thin material. A secondary challenge then immerges: How can an armature be designed to resist the shrinking paper, but also disassemble from inside the resulting cocoon?

The exploration takes inspiration from the cocoon lamps designed by the Castiglioni brothers, as well as a long line of creative people using paper in lamp making and sculpture.