PX-Lab is a company I founded together with Gustav Bennich, Felix Torssell and John Bergevald. We all met while we were studying Product Design Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology. I later dropped out and continued my studies in Industrial Design at Umeå Institute of Design, but we all share a lot of opinions about design and consumer products. Mainly, that design is a combination of technology and art. It's common to look at design as something that should hide technology, but we believe technology is beautiful and should be in the forefront.

The goal with PX-Lab is to make the inside of the product a part of the user experience. The user should be able to understand what they own, so that they can repair it, customize it and upgrade it. We make all our products for assembly AND disassembly, so when you buy a product from us,

you truly own it.

ASSEMBLY_ONE is the first product designed and engineered by PX-Lab. It's been an incredible journey.

The mission of the PX-Lab is to give people more control over the technology they own.

PX-Lab stands for independence and a love for technology. While we are not driven by hate, we are fundamentally a part of a counter movement against the way corporations make products today. These ideas gave rise to a visual identity characterized by an edgy and technical look.

One of the first things we did after the brand philosophy had been decided was to figure out what the product would be.

A portable lamp for interior use was both technically interesting for the user, and technically feasible for us as a first product. To make the product more interesting we decided that it should be dimmable and have adjustable color temperature. Physical interfaces was important because it felt more honest and tactile. We decided on having sliders instead of knobs, because it made sense to have a clear "Start" and "Stop". It's also gives the product a more unique look and feel. Usually you would have one slider for brightness and one for color temperature, but we thought it was more honest to have one slider for each LED. There is one white and one yellow. Mixing the controls results in a final brightness and color of the lamp, similar to how an old faucet mix cold and warm water to get a temperature that's somewhere in between.

Charging with USB-C was an easy decision. These requirements on the product guided the necessary components, which became:

The original idea was that the battery, potentiometers and switch was going to be 100% standard components, so the user can purchase replacement components from third-party stores and repair the lamp independently from PX-Lab. We later found ourselves in a position where this solution would be too difficult for the average person to put together. In the end, everything had to be apart of custom subassemblies to make the assembly process easier, but those ARE replaceable. With some knowledge it's fairly easy to make your own custom subassemblies, which we at PX-Lab support as much as we can, but that is not a part of the standard user experience.

We now knew what components we needed to make the lamp work, but we had to figure out how they would be placed in physical space, as well as what extra mechanical components we needed to keep it all together. We explored a lot with both real and virtual models to find a architecture that worked well for the user experience as well as the brand. It had to be easy and interesting to use, but equally important, it had to align with the brand and philosophy of PX-Lab.

The following images are just a small fraction of all the different types of concepts and variations we were exploring.

The electronics was one of the most difficult and rewarding part of the development process, because we all had very little experience working with it.

The schematics is where all the electrical components and overall electrical architecture was decided. The circuit is divided into 3 parts. The Battery Management System (BMS) and two dimmer parts. We googled our way through it and prototyped both with breadboards and PCBs.

The most difficult part about making the PCB was to make sure it works well in real life with all the connectors, screws and dimensions, as well as optimizing for Electromagnetic Compatibility (more on that later).

The first image is the design of the final PCB, and the second image is our first prototype.

At this point, we knew the features of the lamp and the necessary electrical components to make it work. We also had an idea of the overall shape, but exactly how it would work hadn't been decided.

At first, the idea for the chassis was to just use regular bent sheet metal, but then we got inspirations from brands like Pedestal and Teenage Engineering. Instead of using a machine to bend the metal, they cut out small slits to make the material weaker in certain areas. It's then easy to bend it by hand. This makes it possible to give the user flat pieces of aluminium that they can bend themselves. This idea aligned well with our company philosophy of inviting the user to the inside of the product.

A lot of the value in the product comes from the idea behind it and what it stands for, therefore the visual expression was going to be important. The finish plays a huge role in that. In our prototypes, we tested powder coating, bead blasting, anodizing and just having the aluminum raw. In the end, a "raw" look suited our edgy and technical brand identity, so we wanted to emphasize the aluminium look. Not having any finish at all was too visually inconsistent and too physically sharp. Bead blasting was too expensive at scale, so we ended up anodizing it. The look and feel of the anodized finish was both physically consistent and very, very beautiful.

So how do we attach the bent sheet metal to each other? The obvious solution was to use bolts and nuts, but that would require the user to have access to the inside of the product at all times, which would not be possible for our design. Pre-welding was not an option because the user was going to do it themselves. Tapping threads in the aluminium was the original idea, but tapping 1mm aluminium with a hole diameter of 4mm was way too unrealiable, since the threads was too fragile. Other products make the user tap the holes themselves but that process is really painful since it requires a lot of force.

The solution we landed on was rivet nuts that comes pre-attached to the sheet metal. It's like a nut that is permanently attached on the inside of the holes. This creates a long engagement length for bolts and since it's steel it's extremely robust. The user can use as much force as they want, without having to worry about breaking the threads.

Here are some images of the rivet nut attached to one of the sheet metal pieces from a prototype. The first image is a rivet nut with a bolt screwed in, the other is the rivet nut alone.

The manual was going to be extremely important since it enables the user to understand how the product is constructed and how it works, which is at the core of the product and the brand.

I did all of the illustrations and layouts. Below are some of the pages, as well as a link to the entire thing.

One of the biggest differences between a student concept project and starting your own product company is manufacturing and suppliers. Students (and larger corporations) have a lot more freedom to design. The students don't have to manufacturer the product at all and large corporations can afford the investment for custom parts. Every little detail we design, we have to find a way to get those parts reliably and at a large scale, without having large sums of money to pay factories. This meant we had to make the product as simple as possible. Reduce customs parts to a maximum and keep the number of suppliers down.

The final assembly is done by the customer, but there is a lot of preparation that has to be done before that. There are in total >10 factories and suppliers we are working with to get everything we need. We order the final parts from Sweden, Germany, Poland, USA and China. At last, a member of the PX-Lab team has to spend around 30min per unit for final preparations and then it is ready for the customer.

As the company grows and we start selling more, all manufacturing will be out-sourced, but because of our low budget at the moment, this is the process we have decided to go with for now.

The plan right now is to focus on the EU market, and more specifically Sweden. This is just to get started and as we get more resources we want to expand as much as possible.

This means that we have to make sure we follow all the rules and regulations of Sweden and the EU. There is the consumer rights, WEEE (Waste of Electronic and Electrical Equipment) and CE. The most complicated of these is CE. The directives that is relevant for our product are RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous substances), EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) and GPSD (General Product Safety Directive). This was really challenging but we worked out way through it.

What I have showed you on this page is only a small fraction of what me and the rest of the team at PX-Lab as been working on. Most of these chapter was hundreds of hours in reality, some less, some more. Regardless, it's by far the biggest project I have ever been a part of.

The collaboration in the team has also been amazing. We are really good at having honest discussions and come to reasonable conclusions. We are very good friends with similar design values, which helps, but we also work hard to create an environment where we can solely focus on the project, without causing unnecessary friction. We are are not overly harsh or overly nice, but rather solution-oriented, honest and pragmatic. The product and the company is the result of an amazing group, and I think this project shows that it's possible to reach so much further when you are not alone. While often times, it's faster to work alone, we made a lot of wise decisions that I'm very proud of, and that wouldn't have been made if I tried to do this alone.

Currently, we are in the last phase before sale. We aim to have the first units sold in October 2023, but sales of larger quantities will probably be possible early 2024.