Racklight provides better lighting in critical areas of server racks to improve visibility of critical hardware, reducing errors and increasing efficiency.
Role
Solo Designer
Context
Second Year Studio
Duration
5 Weeks, Fall 2025
The Brief
Design an innovative luminaire that creates or uses light for a specific purpose. Begin by researching a task, environment, and the user. It can be anything, but you will have to research that purpose, and then do journey mapping and insight documents to help you understand how to design a light that will focus on your task.
Constraints
All lighting materials must be purchased prewired. (NO coding or sensors – NO open flames)
Research
I chose to explore lighting for server racks. Alan here is my dad, so I was able to see his rack in a data center, get hands on and replace some hardware, ask lots of questions, verify ideas, and borrow a mini rack to build off of to ensure compatibility.
I did some material testing and determined that the best light source would be wide and diffused. This is because a wide light source causes the light to wrap around wires, resulting in less harsh shadows. This is important because harsh shadows tend to make it difficult to accurately identify ports and to trace wires back to their origin.
I did some material testing and determined that the best light source would be wide and diffused. This is because a wide light source causes the light to wrap around wires, resulting in less harsh shadows. This is important because harsh shadows tend to make it difficult to accurately identify ports and to trace wires back to their origin.
Through doing work on server racks myself and roleplaying an IT professional, I determined a few features that would be helpful. These include a tray to put screws and nuts while working, and some way to organize unplugged wires when swapping hardware.
Development
After much inital concept generation, I determined that the way to go would be a light bar that mounts to the rack using the same standard mounting points that regular server hardware uses. I explored several different ways of doing this and landed on the first one seen here.
Prototyping
I spent a lot of time experimenting with ways to install the light to a server rack and making test parts to get the fit right. I decided that there would be two options for installation: a clip-in version and a screw in version. The clip-in one would go somewhere where there wasn't existing hardware and the screw in could go over existing hardware, which was a feature suggested by the client.
This is the first complete prototype. It had a handful of issues, including a very rough slide up and down, it was hard to assemble cleanly, and rotating the light tended to rotate the whole metal bar, which led to finicky positioning. The clip to keep it in pace vertically was also a pain to work with.
Following this test, I solved these problems with a linear bearing, some alignment rods, and some screws to hold the bar in place, respectively. These were applied in the final prototype.
Final Assembly
I ended up 3D printing the light in multiple segments and assembling it with epoxy. I would like to revisit this project at some point and build a metal version.
Introducing…
