Life in a rental apartment has its cons but one thing that comes to my rescue each time is to set up our lighting! Lighting can make or break a space and a modular solution like Totem Lamp is a solution we all need as it presents a modular solution – adaptable to each room we have.
Inspired by the Native American Totem Pole, the Totem Light is made up of individual light modules that can be used together by stacking on top of each other as a floor lamp. The individual modules can be hanged from the ceiling or even used as a table lamp. Made of hand-blown glass, each module of the light carries a unique texture that makes the lamp literally stand out and shine.
The textured glass brings to mind a reflective surface, where the evening lights shimmer gently each night. Minimal, hand-crafted, modular, and functional – the lamp is the perfect lighting solution and the only limitation is your imagination!
Flat-packed designs are really quite intriguing! They’re portable, easy to put together, and occupy minimum space. From foldable furniture designs to photo studios and stationery, there’s nothing that cannot be flat-packed. These designs, not only rate high on space efficiency, but also eliminate the usage of heavier space-consuming designs. They are definitely functionally and ergonomically beneficial, but they also possess minimal and clean aesthetics, that allow them to harmoniously blend with any living space. Flat-packed designs are the future!
Spinel is a hanging light designed to be easily transformed. The main goal was to create a product that didn’t take up too much space and was also sustainable. “Our responsibility as designers is to produce objects that occupy the smallest possible volume. The purpose is to use the least amount of raw material, producing long-lifespan objects that can be easily recycled,” says Guille Cameron. The origami-like form is minimal, elegant, and certainly unique. Unfolding the lamp adds a dynamic layer to the product and the wooden design itself is a warm addition to any space.
While there is no doubt this lamp is a stunner, it is a statement piece in the holistic development of a product, making it an example for industrial designers across the globe!
The pandemic forced us all to take a deeper look at ourselves and get creative in our creations. While that sounds easier said than done (all the banana bread and Dalgona coffee viral trends speak of our need to create!), designer Manu Bano went through the same creative process as we did and came up with an innovative design – the OBJ-01 lamp! The process of going from paper sketches to production is a daunting one, but what do you do without access to any production workshops? You simplify! The OBJ-01 is a raw sheet of metal – be it steel, stainless steel, or brass that is laser cut, assembled by hand, and needs no welding.
Don’t let OBJ-01’s simplicity fool you, the lamp does not sacrifice functionality. The circular dish adds an interactive element that acts as an adjustable lampshade, taking your light from 0 to 100 at the flick of your wrist. As Manu explains, “On this occasion, there was practically no research, the design process was an exercise of intuition. I decided to reuse the cardboard from online purchases I made during the pandemic and use it as material for mockups. I started working with this cardboard and a knife cutter, making different cuts and folds to the cardboard to transform a 2D sheet into a 3D object with different uses. My intention from the beginning was to achieve a small object that I could send flat packed all over the world, so starting the process from a flat sheet was important.” The lamp comes with an integrated custom touch dimmer, with the conductivity of the metal allowing it to work as a switch. Just tap the metal plate to turn the light on/off, and multiple taps let you adjust the brightness.
Manu’s experimentation showcases the ingenuity we can discover in times of need – reinforcing the fact that you can create with what you have as long as you are determined. The minimal, flatpack approach of the design lets you keep this on your bedside without any extra switches cluttering your tablespace with its touch conductive surface. Simple, smart, efficient, and DIY is one of the most efficient product designs I have ever seen!
I will never stop being amazed by how designers are pushing the boundaries by creating sustainable products. Nuclée is a lamp created from discarded banana flesh and it is….truly bananas! The French designer duo came up with the concept and produced it during a six-month residency at the National Taiwan Craft Research Institute (N.T.C.R.I.) in Taiwan.
The minimal lamp puts the sustainable material front and center with a bamboo circle around it to highlight it. Banana fibers from the plantations are usually considered as waste after the traditional extraction process and cast aside. However, the designers were intrigued by this. material and found it fascinating when working with a lighting design concept. After empirical research, they succeeded in stabilizing the plant tissue using a particular refining technique and after applying different pressure as well as heat parameters. This new material is highlighted by shapes of bent bamboo, inspired by the internal structure of the banana tree stem and that is how the form of Nuclée mood lights came to be.
“Settled near Hualien, on the east coast of Taiwan, the Kavalan aboriginal tribe is expert in the use of banana fiber: they make it their traditional clothing. I had the chance to meet them, to share their way of life, and to learn from their elders the ancestral techniques to use this plant. This new material is sublimated here in curved bamboo shapes, inspired by the banana tree structure,” said Dorian as he elaborated on the inception of his idea. The stabilizing process also gives it a color range from white to dark brown while enhancing the natural texture of the banana flesh.
After learning about these ingenious age-old methods of working with this plant, the designers used the process of extraction using only the outer part of the stem and other techniques to develop this modern sustainable lamp. Their experiments had them checking the material’s reaction to heat, cold, humidity, pressure, combination with other materials, and more to make sure it was actually usable in a wide variety of conditions. This also helps to break the notion that sustainable designs aren’t strong or long-lasting. Nuclée is also a project winner of the “Best of Year” Grand Prize (New York, 2020) and of the Green Product Award (Berlin, 2021).
Designers: Cordélia Faure & Dorian Etienne of ENSCI Les Ateliers
And at the beginning of 2021, we all said, “Let there be light!” Enter the Tune, a minimal portable lamp designed for indoor and outdoor use. Tune is not meant to be the main source of light in a space and falls into the ambient light category with its soft illumination. It is called Tune because it lets you ‘tune’ the lamp the mood of the hour. You can tune it to create an atmosphere for dinner in the garden or for cozy movie night – you decide the mood lighting, the lamp will be attuned to it.
It is a smart lamp for future homes complete with a 360-degree charging stand and wireless charging capabilities. You can get the most out of this product design by having a set of two or three lamps to achieve optimal flexibility and space illumination. The modular stands and lampshades let you play around with the light set up. Each arm of the stand has wireless charging transmitters and profiled positioning dents with magnets to hold it in place – this makes the lamp an overall seamless product design.
Tune is designed to stand horizontally, vertically, or on the side depending on your needs. It features a knob that allows you to adjust the intensity as well as the color temperature of the light. “The critical aspects of the functioning of a portable lamp, intended for outdoor use, are durability and tightness. Therefore, great importance has been attached to the design of the external housing, which protects the internal electrical components against weather conditions, and above all, water,” explains Mikołaj Nicer.
Woo-bi desk lamp instantly reminds us of our childhood when we would wear brightly colored raincoats and splash water everywhere as we walked around with our friends.
‘Woo-bi’ literally means raincoat in Korean and the emotional design expresses a child’s innocence through soft lighting. Complete with a little ‘hood’, the playful form and warm CMF really connects with the user. We love the form of this design and the hat adds in functionality by being movable – just as it protects you from the rain, move the hat to control your exposure to the lamp’s brightness. Another fun feature is the knob of the lamp, which doubles as the tip of the umbrella/hat and helps you dim/brighten the lamp as needed. The charging point comes with a magnet for quick docking. If the yellow is too chirpy, there is a green variant to soothe your eyes!
The minimal desk lamp is sure to spark joy even on gloomy days.
Luke Kelly found his calling in an abandoned railcar. As he recounts, stumbling upon some antique, industrial lighting fixtures while exploring an old railroad in New Hampshire, Kelly decided to take them home and create something new from them. Fast forward to today and his creative career in designing lighting fixtures has taken off. Since the start of his career, Kelly’s LED Rope Lighting designs have been strung from the ceilings of popular hotel lobbies and busy city restaurants and are recognized for their customizability and versatility.
Luke Kelly’s LED Rope Lighting fixtures are adaptable by nature due to the materials sourced for their construction. Built by starting with flexible LEDs, each fixture’s brightness is subdued and covered with woven nylon rope and silicone to provide durability and pliability, allowing the light fixture to maintain a fixed formation when woven in even free-form designs. Luke Kelly’s collection of light fixtures come with a wide array of available options, ranging from unconventional chandeliers that merge with the ceiling to wall-mountable light fixtures that pop with brass, nickel, or copper accents.
Kelly’s Tracer Loop appears almost like a luminous jump rope or rope swing and attaches both of its ends to the ceiling with standard junction boxes. Then, longer and shorter ropes intersect with one another, creating a sort of cat’s cradle of glowing LED ropes. The Tracer Swag, another standout of Kelly’s LED Rope Lighting collection, utilizes a U-Bolt, affixed to a standard junction box, from which various light ropes hang and cluster to give the effect of ivy growing any which way on the side of a building.
Each of Luke Kelly’s LED Rope Lighting fixtures is presented differently to accommodate the space where they’re hung. Whether it’s a simple, minimalist bedroom or grandiose, gilded ballroom, Luke Kelly notes, “Every space presents a challenge– from the intimacy of a restaurant to the openness of a hotel lobby to the visibility of storefront, to the privacy of one’s home– our lighting is made for these challenges because customization and adaptability is not an afterthought, it is our focus.”
Any millennial can tell you that when it comes to interior spaces, both houseplants and light fixtures have this way of making a bedroom or office space feel a little bit more complete. Lighting design and indoor plants can complement one another by shifting focus from one to the other, and so on. Or, in some cases, they merge into a single product that simultaneously brightens and breathes new air into different indoor spaces. That’s the case for the ceiling, pendant, and floor lamp called Ring, a European Product Design Award-winning interior light fixture designed by Jackie Luo and Wilfried Buelacher for Lampenwelt.
The lighting fixture is ultimately a simple design, thanks to its hybrid of design attributes from both integral parts of this product: the common houseplant and lighting accessory. The lamp itself can be hung as a pendant lamp, but can also function as a floor lamp when not suspended from the ceiling. If the pendant lamp is the decided lamp, then the pots for houseplants can either be positioned in the center of the lamp’s ring or entirely done without. A centerpiece for Ring provides the placeholder for plant pots to hang from but can be opted out for a straight, iron bar. Alternatively, users can insert a spotlight that works to enhance the light coming from Ring, which can be used for any variation of the lamp. Thanks to the subdued yet infinite nature of the lamp’s circular head, houseplants are free to drape and grow as naturally as they please. The fixture itself gently diffuses light throughout the room in a circular frame so that maximal reach is guaranteed. This product’s ambient, warm lighting, and rounded top bring a sense of adaptability to any space you choose to position it.
During the daytime, houseplants like String-of-Pearls or ivy can bask in the sunlight but come sunset, the Ring’s circle of light provides a gentle frame for leaf-filled pots. With today’s generation’s excitement over houseplant decor, it’s no wonder Ring’s final product design doesn’t present itself as a hybrid at all, but rather, a distinguishable household item deserving of its own light.
Designers: Jackie Luo, Wilfried Buelacher (of JWdesign) for Lampenwelt
While the moon might not provide so strong a brightness in contrast to the sun, the Moon has a way of reintroducing us to tranquility, the concept behind the new desk lamp – Moon Light. The delicate, folding desk lamp softly illuminates any room it’s in with a dual-tone light reminiscent of the Moon’s glow. The lamp is as functional as it is artful; folded, the lamp might evoke images of the Moon hanging just above a tree. Speaking to the desk lamp’s practicality and artfulness, the lamp effuses each room with the mellow, but illuminating glow we so often seek from the Moon.
Based in Hangzhou, China, Wenjie Zheng conceptualized the lamp by marrying technology with poetry. Upon first glance, the lamp is attractively uncomplicated and, simply, gets the job done. While pragmatism and application matter, Moon Light has so much to offer that exceeds its simplistic appearance. The lamp is essentially made of up three main parts: two long flutes and a toroidal ring. A closer look reveals that the linear flute hinges at the lamp’s ring, its focal point. The linear flute functions as the lamp’s primary source of light and can stretch out to a maximum of 145 degrees from the lamp’s center. The lamp’s design prioritizes optical prism lighting, which means that the glass is cut in such a way that naturally reflects and bends light, which exemplifies Zheng’s dedication to reproducing the feeling and illumination that’s generally associated with moonlight.
Moon Light’s main appeal is the toroidal ring that represents the lunar satellite and centerpiece of the design. The ring light offers auxiliary light, akin to the kind the Moon offers, which is ideal for younger children to use as a night light. Auxiliary and optical prism lighting distinctly enhances this design as its purpose is not to provide bright light, similar to that which comes from the sun, but to instead reproduce the tranquil glow of the Moon whether for yourself and that book you bring to bed or for a younger child who always seems to sleeps a bit better whenever the Moon gets to hang around. Best of all, this night light brings you the tranquility needed to clear your brain and get you that good night’s sleep.
The right piece of furniture can truly make or break the aesthetics of a space. It is about good design and not expensive pieces (although, they do sometimes go hand in hand). While we always pay more attention to the bigger pieces that arguably catch the eye like tables and couches, it is the supporting elements like good lighting that can elevate your interior game – almost literally with this Pulley lamp!
As the name suggests, the conceptual pulley-based lamp adds a dynamic and playful element to the otherwise standard floor lamp which never makes you go “Wow, where’d you get that?”. This lamp reveals geometric movements as a feature of the design. “The focus was on purely revealing the structure of the lamp and the pulley that supports the lamp,” says Kim. Using the sliding switch will slightly tilt the lamp upwards to turn it off and the reverse motion will restore it back to its resting position which is perpendicular to the pole. It is more of a focus light that can help with reading or working as opposed to the traditional floor lamp that provides an ambient light by usually dimly flooding the ceiling which isn’t helpful for the purpose mentioned earlier.
The lamp itself is minimal and sleek, it could fit unobtrusively with any modern interior theme. It almost looks as if Apple launched a lamp because of its simple aesthetics, clean linear design, and the signature white tones. If the concept includes a sound that goes with the tactile feature of turning the light on/off it would be great – who doesn’t love a satisfying, animated click sound! It certainly makes for a lovely upgrade from those black-pole-inverted-lampshade floor lamps that we all had in our 20s!
