Facade is a hand-operated kinetic sculpture based on the concept of contrasting the effortless task of consuming energy with the effortful task of generating energy.

A lone lightbulb encasing an LED sits at the center of the wall-mounted piece, surrounded by wooden gears sandwiched between the acrylic front plane and the wooden back plane. A hand crank protrudes from the side of the piece. As the user rotates the crank, the chain of gears rotate, with each gear's movement slower than the one before it. The final gear rotates at a snail's pace. Finally, after many crank rotations by the user, the light suddenly turns on for two seconds before it goes dark again, forcing the user to continue cranking if they wish to see more light.

 

Four configurations of Facade were devised and modeled in SolidWorks, and a physical prototype created of the base configuration.