Raphael Murray Browne

Acrylic sandwich lamps were the result of a university project requiring 10 products to be made with optimisation for batch production with the aim of selling them at the Bovey Tracey Craft Fair.

The lamps were made from layers of 5mm clear acrylic as the “filling” of the sandwich, and then a variety of materials made up the “bread”. The materials in question were:

• Larch
• Ash
• Stainless Steel (304)
• Corian
• Laserply

with varying aesthetics and success.

With the simple geometric forms, any inaccuracies were amplified, and so I decided to slightly round the corners to make any misalignment less obvious. The materials were lasercut or CNC milled to minimise variation.

Corian is a synthetic stone-like material that comes in a variety of colours. It has a subtle translucency that softens its edges to the eye. While usually used in countertops, Corian has been used here for its cool touch, unusual aesthetic, and weight.

I reclaimed some larch from a previous project and laser cut it into shape before using danish oil on it to seal the burn marks, a technique I was not aware of before experimentation. The orange hues of the wood give the internal light warmer reflections.

The metals was originally my favourite because it deviated so far from what the university resources shaped as “normal”, while still feeling premium and luxurious. The stainless steel gives a cold touch while feeling sturdy and expensive, reminiscent of high-end hi-fi equipment.

An initial prototype testing out the feasibility as well as the attractiveness of stainless steel. The strip was manually drilled with no jig hence any misalignment. All metals, woods, and acrylics used in this project were laser cut, allowing for high accuracy between layers and consistency among units.

A large part of this project was working around costings. For this, I learnt how to use Microsoft Excel, creating a large spreadsheet capable of taking word material inputs at “stainless steel” and outputting a calculated price using a lookup table. The spreadsheet also took into account the variations in labour costs for each combination of materials.

I created a press release, using dense text to convey an exact intention on the single A4 side, while colouring important words in red and blue, allowing people to scan through the document quickly. The press release was instrumental in understanding the identity of the lamps, and the context in which I envisioned they would reside. The warmer hues of the wooden lamp suited a night light, whereas the cooler lights from the metal and Corian lamps suited a desk, or kitchen, or bookshelf.

I made a series of posters and instagram posts for online presence. This was originally because I didn’t know what a press release is, and thought it meant just a kind of online presence. The Y2K poster for my metal lamp is inspired by the colour palette and artstyle from the videogame “MARATHON”, which released in 2026 and has been my latest graphical obsession.

Moving into second year, I wanted to raise the standard of my work considerably — to stop coasting and find the real limits of what I could make. Keycaps became the vehicle for that: small, exacting objects with an enthusiast community that obsesses over feel, sound, ergonomics and look. Part of the motivation was selfish — I wanted beautiful keycaps myself, without paying the premium that the few makers in this space charge.

By using the keycap as a medium, I could put materiality in the foreground, treating the investigation of different materials as the whole point of the product rather than an afterthought. I drew up a set of material ambitions to chase: metal — brass, coated copper, steel, even gold; ceramic — glossy or matte, with a huge tactile range; Jesmonite — an inexpensive, eco-friendly entry point; wood — rarely seen, because of the intricate cutting a keycap demands; and glass — ambitious, but a keyboard like rows of tiny glass blocks could be one of a kind.

I gathered the research into a material taxonomy laid out as a magazine in InDesign — far less technical than my first attempt, much nicer to look at, and far more time-consuming to make.

The main build focused on ceramic, and specifically on the problems of casting porcelain, clear-glazed keycaps. I cut a two-part mould and worked through the casting process, drying the pieces in a hot cupboard before firing them in a kiln.

Wall thickness varied with how long the slip sat in the mould before pouring out — the longer it sat, the thicker the wall. That variation was deliberate: a search for the balance between interior space for the switch stem and the strength of the wall. In the end I favoured the thinnest walls that survived firing, since the thicker ones simply didn’t leave enough room inside.

They came out very pretty and feel wonderful to touch. The one surprise was scale: the shrinkage in the second firing — or maybe an illusion of the glaze — left them feeling suddenly smaller than I’d expected.

The brief was to design “something between a smartphone and a dumbphone”, with a trans-generational audience in mind. Where my earlier work had been hands-on from day one, this project was led by research — and that was the point. If I want to be a good product designer, I have to be able to find and understand the people I’m designing for.

I interviewed people across a spread of generations — children, young adults, adults and older adults — about their screen time and, crucially, the things they felt they couldn’t live without. I couldn’t reach quite the range I’d hoped (it’s hard to get time with the very young and the very old), but the conversations were invaluable, and paired with desk research they gave me a clear picture of what the market actually wants.

The research kept circling one idea: nomophobia — the anxiety of being without a working phone, a term first coined by a UK Post Office study. Rather than fight that attachment head-on, the concept leans into it: a set of jewellery where each piece quietly takes over one specific phone function, so it’s easier to leave the phone itself behind.

Three products came out of it:

• A communication ring — a subtle LED band running through the middle that glows when you send or receive a call. The dimensions are based on a ring I wear every day.
• An AI wristband — the “brains” of the set: audio in and out, a minimal 16×16 display for things like a direction arrow and a distance, and a connection to the other pieces. Imagine leaving your phone behind but still scanning a restaurant’s QR menu with a camera pendant and talking your order through with the band.
• A camera pendant — no screen, operated by a single button on the chain, sending photos straight to a phone over Bluetooth once in range — for people whose essential is always having a camera on them.

I rendered the pieces in Blender — its material and lighting workflow is far ahead of anything else I have access to — and built two posters: a system map showing who each piece is for, and a hero shot to present the set at its best.

Finally I made final sketch models of each product. With the university workshops closed for Christmas I ordered the prints from a third party; they came back surprisingly clean off a 0.2 mm nozzle, and a coat of silver spray plus a few details finished them off.

Overall I’m happy with it. If I’m honest I tunnelled onto the dumbphone idea and let the trans-generational side of the brief slip — something I’d hold onto more tightly next time — but the research-led approach taught me far more than the making did.

This inaugural project set out to narrow the gap between the user and the object — to treat the tool less as something held and more as a direct extension of the body. The result is a 3D-printed glove–bat hybrid that deliberately blurs the line between handle and playing surface, so the boundary where the hand ends and the paddle begins is never quite clear. Where a conventional bat asks the hand to grip and adapt to a fixed form, this one wraps around and follows the hand, letting intention travel through the wrist and into the ball with as little translation as possible.

Working through successive printed prototypes, each iteration tightened the fit and rebalanced the weight, testing how much of the paddle could dissolve into the glove before control was lost. The process became as much about removing material and ceremony as adding it — paring the object back until what remained felt like an honest continuation of the player rather than a separate piece of equipment.

Modelled in CAD and scaled against the hand, the final form holds the playing surface as a natural extension of the palm.

Placeholder CV page. The real two-page CV (scrolling) will be loaded into this view later. For now this is just the fizzle-to-a-page target so the CV button has somewhere to go.

Raphael Murray-Browne — third-year Product & Furniture Design student. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.