Tag Archives: lampshade

This gorgeous Umbrella-inspired lampshade can be opened or closed to adjust brightness

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A worthy winner of last year’s Tyvek Design Awards, the Wagasa Lamp has a beautiful design and an even more alluring interaction that lets you adjust the lamp’s brightness. Taking inspiration from the shape of an umbrella or parasol, the lamp comes with a shade made from flexible Tyvek fabric (developed by DuPont) attached to wooden rods. The lamp can be unfurled or shut like an umbrella, exposing or enclosing the empty space within, which increases or decreases the amount of light that makes its way out of the lamp. This unique interaction gives the Wagasa Lamp just one of those beautiful user experiences that makes it an instant crowd favorite – but even more importantly, the lamp’s innately Asian/Japanese aesthetic makes it a wonderful inclusion in any minimalist or oriental-themed home!

Designer: Solenn Roch

The Wagasa lamp’s design comprises just two materials outside the lamp’s bulb and electrical housing. You’ve got the Tyvek shade, made of two sheets of the synthetic paper-like material, and a wooden structure that holds the Tyvek shades up, allowing you to adjust their position. “The translucent Dupont Tyvek material diffuses light softly, creating a warm atmosphere,” mentions Swiss-based Solenn Roch.

The design is almost identical to the kind of umbrellas found in cocktails and drinks, and operates the same way too. Here, a threaded base lets you rotate a knob to adjust the open-ness or closed-ness of the umbrella, while the outer umbrella cone’s width helps determine the lamp’s brightness. When completely opened/horizontal, the lamp allows much more light to filter outwards from the top and bottom, diffusing wonderfully through the Tyvek shade. Close it, however, and the conical area decreases, also closing the empty space inside the lamp to create a smaller illuminating area. The controls aren’t precise, but they’re fun as heck, and you’ll find yourself constantly reaching for the rotating knob to show off the lamp to your guests!

The current prototype is made out of 3D-printed plastic parts, although Solenn hopes to make a version out of natural wood soon.

The beauty of the Wagasa lamp lies entirely in its simplicity and playfulness. In a lot of ways, principally, it works quite similar to the IKEA PS 2014 Pendant Lamp, but while that lamp allures with its uniquely faceted pattern, this one is just a call-back to a simpler time, coupled with a wonderfully Eastern-themed minimalist aesthetic.

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Terrazzo lampshade casts a refreshing glow thanks to recycled plastic

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We all look to lamps and other lighting fixtures not just to illuminate but also to set an atmosphere, but most of the time it isn’t the light itself that creates this effect. More often than not, it’s the lampshade, shield, or any other material that reflects, refracts, and diffuses the light in interesting and sometimes mesmerizing ways that can dazzle and even affect our moods. Most of the time, those lamp shields are made of glass, metal, or plastic, but there are other, more interesting alternatives available. This particular design, for example, not only uses a sustainable material, it also gives it a distinctive spin that makes not only the shade but also the light it throws a sight to behold.

Designer: Fuhua Wang, Weichih Chen

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It’s not uncommon these days to see recycled plastics being used for design, and a particularly big source is ocean-bound plastic, including PET bottles, bags, and more. Most of the time, the pellets produced from breaking down plastic material are colored to match the requirements of a specific design, but the Ondina sustainable pendant lighting preserves some of the properties of the properties of plastic materials to create a more interesting appearance.

The result is a material that looks similar to terrazzo that is often used in tiles for flooring and walls. The small bits and pieces of color give the translucent blue layer some vibrancy, though it could also be a representation of the pollution that litters the oceans. Coincidentally, or perhaps intentionally, the lamp shield actually has a wavy shape, not unlike the waves of bodies of water.

The pendant lamp itself is actually pretty simple, just an LED aluminum tube hanging from a ceiling by its two ends. The lamp shade is placed some distance above the tube, giving ample space for the light to diffuse and spread rather than being reflected directly by the material. This creates a bluish glow not only around the lamp but also on the ceiling as it passes through the translucent shield. The color is soft and calming, even with a pure white LED, but it also still reflects enough of that bright light so that the lamp functions as more than just a mood lamp, sufficiently illuminating the space around it.

Every part of Ondina is designed to be sustainable and extensible, applying the lamp shade to more than just a pendant lamp. It can be used for wall or floor lamps as well, just with some modification of the design. More importantly, the simple components make it trivial to replace parts that are broken, prolonging the life of the product and preventing it from adding to the waste already swimming in our waters.

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