Switch Sketch

The Problem

I’m trying to read more books this year. I find myself starting without finishing a lot—it’s hard to keep my goals in mind. I keep track on my phone, in a note, but I keep track of a lot in there, and it doesn’t have a strong presence in my daily life. Plus, I have to remember to update it whenever I finish another book.

The Solution

I have my Book Stack! Now I can take a book I’ve finished and place it in a spot on my shelf where it will light up and remind me what I’ve read and that I’ll have to keep reading if I want the stack to get bigger. The physical presence of the Book Stack has—in some small way—changed my relationship to the books themselves.

The Circuit

The LEDs attached to the books complete the circuit when a book is added to the stack. They are wired in parallel, so it doesn’t matter if there’s one book or twenty; the lights on each book should still come on. I think this is how strings of Christmas lights must be wired—if they’re the type that don’t all go out when one bulb dies.

Conclusion

This project is a little reverse-engineered: I definitely had the idea for a light up book stack before knowing what function it could serve in my life, and it’s not a perfect solution for the problem I proposed (one better solution might be reorganizing my books). But I liked the idea of wiring additional LEDs in series for each object.