There’s no shortage of compact stick-on, clip-on, magnetic LED lights out there. And if you want your product to stand out, you better focus on features or design. So Osram has concentrated on the latter with its lovely Cuby light and its flexible clip.
They’ve been used to launch missile strikes, eject warp cores and sound countless alarms, and now you can have a big red panic button of your own for the considerably less dramatic purpose of turning off the lights. Unless you consider saving electricity a life or death matter.
Overhead lighting is possibly the least flexible way to illuminate a room. Flip a switch, the bulb goes on, and cleansing light shines down. End of story. It you want to switch up the lighting for, say, a little more mood, you’re out of luck. Unless you’ve chosen the impossibly clever Greta pendant lamp, which can throw light onto your ceiling with the pull of a drawstring.
Styrofoam is widely used because cheap and disposable, if not entirely recyclable. But when you heat-shrink it and fashion it into a giant ball, its value skyrockets to $US700. High concepts!
Whether or not the Hinderberg tragedy was to blame, blimps and zeppelins never really caught on as a popular form of travel. But as Italian designer Flaminio Bovino shows, they certainly make for a beautiful lighting accessory.
Packing as much clever functionality as it does style, Roderick Vos’s Mr Ed lamp camouflages itself between the literary classics on your bookshelf. Not only does it prevent the works of J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins from toppling over, but it will also cast a warm glow in your home library.
After years of hegemony, the design pendulum is finally starting to swing back from modern, efficient design to an unvarnished, industrial aesthetic. Take, for example, this huge, heavy concrete slab filled with energy-annihilating incandescent lights.
It’s a little-known fact that’s rarely mentioned in the comic books, but in addition to battling the forces of evil with a cybernetic supersuit, Tony Stark also has a passion for stylish Art Nouveau lighting.
