Hasta La Ideas

Russian product designer Ilya Tkach has created a simple desk lamp featuring a light source that snaps onto its stem with a magnet.

Ilya Tkach‘s Magnon light comprises just two pieces. LEDs are contained within a long wooden oak block, along with a magnet that runs down one edge.

The magnet allows this element to stick to the flat sides of a white metal stem, which sits at an angle to the circular base.

“The lamp is fixed on the base just by magnetic forces, and can be easily moved and rotated,” said the designer.

The wooden baton can be used separately as a handheld torch or attached to other metal surfaces.

Small metal objects such as stationary can also be stored along the magnet to keep the desk clear.

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two-part desk lamp appeared first on Dezeen.

East London design brand Hulger has launched a second design for its award-winning Plumen low-energy lightbulbs.

The Plumen 002 produces a softer light than the original design that’s more suited to ambient lighting.

Like the original Plumen design, which won Design of the Year when it launched three years ago, the new product is a compact fluorescent bulb that replaces the usual prongs and whirls of a standard energy efficient bulb with a sculptural shape that means it looks attractive in light fittings where the naked bulb is left on display.

Whereas the first Plumen bulb was created by drawing with looping tubes of glass, this new design involved shaping the form of the fluorescent tube itself.

The sculpted tube takes on the profile of a traditional light bulb from some angles but the form has been cut away and pierced to leave swooping curves, straight edges when viewed from the side and a oblong void in the middle.

“The geometry of the Plumen 002 creates interesting resonances in the square and oblong spaces they will usually inhabit,” said Hulger founder, creative director and designer Nicolas Roope. “The effect is particularly strong when used in series and when played off against walls and surfaces.”

The concept was to blow the glass tube like a bottle, which still maintaing the loop required for the technology to function. “This approach hadn’t been done in any mainstream bulbs before, but the team believed it was plausible,” said the designers, who enlisted the help of Texan neon sculptor Tony Greer to advise on the different lighting effects and intensities that various shapes would achieve.

“We looked for the right balance between an integrated and disintegrated construction, between organic and geometric form, something that would present a certain dynamic while remaining gentle,” said designer Bertrand Clerc.

“The work of modern sculptor Barbara Hepworth really helped us in creating an interesting relation between this hollow space and the surface of the outer body,” he added. “The transfer between these two elements also establishes an elegant connection between the rather contemporary inner silhouette, and the more traditional appearance of the outer silhouette.”

The new design is a 7W bulb giving off the equivalent of a 30W incandescent light source and the low brightness means it doesn’t need shading.

The company has launched the Plumen 002 design on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter today in the hope that its community of supporters who rallied round the original design will help to put the new bulb into production.

They also hinted that an LED Plumen bulb could be on the way.

Hulger created its first series of sculptural low-energy bulb prototypes in 2007, coinciding with the phasing out of inefficient incandescent light bulbs and aiming to reinvent the ugly compact fluorescent lamps as a beautiful product.

The Plumen 001 bulb designed by Samuel Wilkinson was released in 2010 and hailed as the world’s first low-energy designer light bulb, winning the Design of the Year award in 2011. It uses 80 percent less energy than a traditional bulb and lasts up to eight times longer.

A smaller version called the Baby Plumen was launched during the London Design Festival 2012.

The post Hulger launches second design for Plumen
designer low-energy light bulb appeared first on Dezeen.

Maritime gas lamps were used as a reference for these pendant lights created by Danish studio Space Copenhagen for design brand &tradition.

To create the Copenhagen Pendant, Space Copenhagen modernised the form of the old lamps once used to illuminate the Danish capital’s piers.

The studio’s design for Danish company &tradition consists of a lacquered metal shade, which is clamped to the cord with four arching plated steel tabs where the curving shape narrows at the top.

“The starting point was to create a design that would allow us to use various metals, but also that the design works from a purely sculptural point of view, with a monochrome finish,” said Space Copenhagen founding partner Peter Bundgaard Rützou. “Depending on the purpose and space it’s used in, the lamp can do both.”

Light is directed downward through a wide hole in the base of the shade.

“The pendant is widest in the middle and narrows at the open top and bottom to ensure that the lamp has a substantial body, while still protecting you from looking directly into the light,” said the studio’s second partner Signe Bindslev Henriksen.

The lamps are available in three sizes and five matte colours. The two smaller designs are made from steel and the larger model is formed from aluminium.

Copenhagen Pendant will be presented at imm Cologne next week, as well as at Maison & Objet in Paris at the end of this month and during Stockholm Design Week in February.

Here’s some more information for the designers:

&tradition launches the Copenhagen Pendant light by Space Copenhagen

In their second collaboration, following the success of the Fly lounge series, &tradition collaborates with Space Copenhagen on a new elegant pendant light.

“We are very pleased to be working with Space Copenhagen again,” says Martin Kornbek Hansen, the Brand Manager of &tradition. “They have an exceptional eye for detail and surface texture, and a unique way of combining the classic with the contemporary.”

An exercise in contrasts, the Copenhagen Pendant combines the classic and the modern, the maritime and the industrial. Its matte lacquered metal lampshade disperses the light in a subtle but spectacular way resembling the classic gaslight feel of the bleak Copenhagen piers.

“Over the years we have made several bespoke light pieces for our interior projects,” says Signe Bindslev Henriksen of Space Copenhagen. “So the biggest challenge in designing the Copenhagen Pendant was to meet our own expectations in making an equally sculptural and functional light.”

Originally, Space Copenhagen designed one version of the pendant, but it expanded into a series of three sizes: 200 millimetres, 350 millimetres and 600 millimetres in diameter, and five matte shades: blush, moss, slate, black and white. “The starting point was to create a design which would allow us to use various metals, but also that the design works from a purely sculptural point of view, with a monochrome finish. Depending on the purpose and space it’s used in, the lamp can do both,” says Space Copenhagen’s other founding partner, Peter Bundgaard Rützou.

The flexibility and attention to detail of the Copenhagen Pendant is a careful consideration inspired by Space Copenhagen’s experience as interior architects. Even the flow of light was carefully planned from the start. “The pendant is widest in the middle and narrows at the open top and bottom to ensure that the lamp has a substantial body, while still protecting you from looking directly into the light,” says Bindslev Henriksen. The downwards light is even and solid, while the subtle uplight is diffused, adding to the atmosphere of the ceiling.

“The Copenhagen Pendant is a perfect example of a classic typology of light reinvented in an innovative and contemporary way, qualities that we value highly at &tradition,” says Kornbek Hansen.

The post Space Copenhagen creates nautical
lamps for &tradition appeared first on Dezeen.

The stem of this task lamp designed by Bao-Nghi Droste forms an exaggerated loop behind the conical shade (+ slideshow).

The Round lamp by Bao-Nghi Droste of Heidelberg, Germany, has a wide shallow shade mounted at a 45 degree angle on the end of the curving steel tube.

“The gently shaped steel tube could be described as the centrepiece of the lamp because on the one hand it pictures the flow of the current all the way up from the base to the light source within the shade, and on the other hand it acts as a function-providing element,” said Droste.

He explained that the loop “provides a handle-like geometry for easily moving the lamp”, which rotates on its base.

Where the stem connects to the back of the shade, small concentric circles radiate outwards over its surface and a small amount of light is allowed to escape at the join.

“Sharp edges concentrically surround the hole as rings imaging a sort of epicenter at which the light emits,” said the designer.

An acrylic defuser covers the light source and emits a wide beam of light suitable for bedside reading or working at a desk.

Images are by Thilo Ross/The Image Agency.

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by Bao-Nghi Droste appeared first on Dezeen.

This floor lamp by Japanese designer Yasutoshi Mifune leans backwards to cast light at an angle.

The SOSO lamp by Mifune Design Studio is made of sheet steel. It has a triangulated base that tapers as it rises into a bent-over pyramid with one curved edge, which allows the lamp to tilt at an angle of 30 degrees.

“I wanted to make a floor lamp which has different forms depending on the angles and directions in which it is seen, by changing its inclination,” Mifune told Dezeen. “When this lamp is used, the lamp’s body, the floor and the ceiling are lit by the reflection of its own light.”

A cylindrical lamp shade is supported off-centre at the top and contains a fluorescent light source.

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by Mifune Design Studio appeared first on Dezeen.