Now this is “green” lighting: Birch and Willow, a small firm in Boston, uses weaves of wood and vines to create very organic (both literal and aesthetic) fixtures. The resulting designs create delightful plays of sparkle, shadow and pattern.
Continue reading ‘birch and willow: biomass materials in lighting fixtures’
Jason Bruges Studio out of London specializes in interactive lighting installations. The work is delightfully esoteric, plus their site has plenty of unique eye candy.
Check out the gorgeous pieces on Lisa Foo & Su Sim’s blog page. Lisa Foo is an architect and Su Sim is a landscape architect, both from Malaysia.
Continue reading ‘LFSS: Light fixtures from recycled water bottles’
U2′s concerts might run long on the media hype, but they are certainly a tour de force of design, staging, and technology. Their latest tour includes an electro-mechanical wonder as its centerpiece, a 360° viewable LED screen that expands and contracts over the band.
If there is one thing that AMC‘s Mad Men proves, it’s that your grandparents were so much cooler than you. Here at Lucept, we’re gearing up for the show’s third season opener on August 16, and to celebrate, we’ve put together a sampling of authentic 1960′s lighting design.
Continue reading ‘we love mad men: authentic lighting from the 60′s’
If the Candela series of portable lighting products were suddenly transported back to the ’50s, I’m sure the headlines would read something like this: “Alien atomic glowing flashlights arrive from Mars!”
Candela was designed by local Boston product design firm Vessel (read this NY Times article about the history of Vessel developing Candela and selling the series to OXO).
Continue reading ‘OXO Candela: lighting innovations from Mars’
Materialise is a rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing firm that produces 3D printed objects ranging from automotive parts to dental appliances. Materialise specializes in processes such as fused deposition modeling, laser sintering, and stereo lithography. Such technologies can directly “print” objects in a range of materials, from ABS to polycarbonate to certain types of metal.
Materialise has launched a design collection, called .MGX, which includes a range of beautifully detailed, highly three-dimensional pendants, floor lamps, etc.
Although it seems like they are exploring the aesthetic side of their technological capability almost as a side project, the results are stunning and demonstrate an amazing new range of styles.
In the very near future, once electrical traces can be printed as part of a fixture housing, a nearly complete fixture will be able to be produced. You can readily imagine an LED fixture with plastic shroud, plastic optics, metal heatsink, and traces ready to accept the LED chip, all printed in one step.
We can’t wait until they use this technology to push beyond discrete decorative fixtures and into new forms of architectural lighting systems.
Check out the pictures of this small home in Bangalore with a striking open-air, thru-cut wall pattern at the corner of an interior garden room. The transformation of the daylight interior lighting into the nighttime electric lighting on the exterior is really striking.
Exceptionally well executed interactive public street art, developed by Montreal multimedia environment design firm Moment Factory. Make sure to check out the video below: notice how refined the various graphic modes are, along with exceptionally precise directional movement tracking.
If you ever need a great source of lighting reference images, check out the Awards section of the Association for Retail Environments site.
The Awards section is stocked full of many years of award-winning projects, neatly organized and loaded with lots of great imagery. I’ve wound up using many of these as reference images in project boards for non-retail related projects.
Frank Buchwald is a German designer and manufacturer of creative, retro-futuristic “machine lights”.
Handcrafted of steel and brass, with extra-long filament incandescent lamps, the fixtures (machines?) evoke a wonderful era that never really existed. Some of them have an almost creature-like quality to them…and they look like they could give Pixar’s Luxo Jr. a real beating if they ever got into a bar fight.
Snog is a small chain in the UK, riding the wave of “unsweetened” frozen yogurt shops. The difference is in their store design. Their latest store, Snog Soho, includes a fantastic ceiling composed of 700 color-changing glass pendants, backed up with some incandescent lighting.
Cinimod Studio was the UK-based lighting designer, and details on the custom lighting tech can be found at e-luminate.
Check out this New York based installation artist, Erwin Redl.
Amazing LED-based installations. His site is loaded with trippy eye candy. Very creative use of the possibilities of LED technology.
References: Trendhunter, Paramedia
Many times, the best way to see the future of your profession is to look to other professions. Microsoft Office Labs, with their “Envisioning” series of videos, present a stunning take on the future of office, education and other environments. Walls that flow video seamlessly across their surfaces, multi-touch interaction, and a fluidity of data that allows instant personalization across a variety of environments and futuristic devices are just some of the themes in the videos.
How could these really be accomplished in terms of lighting technology? With advancements in OLED display panels and products such as E-Ink, wall surfaces that contain highly visible data without producing excessive brightness are just around the corner. In fact, some of these developments are already functioning prototypes in labs, but not ready for commercialization just yet.
Even more stunning: some of these videos are already several years old. Microsoft is definitely looking far into the future.
http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/Envisioning.aspx
Still fighting just to get dimming in your projects?
I had the opportunity to walk the many, many floors of Chicago’s gigantic Merchandise Mart for the recent NeoCon trade show. While definitely focused on furniture and fabrics, the show offered some stunning showrooms with lots of lighting inspiration.
Check out the original post on blog.lampartners.com.
Now this is what I call “intelligent lighting”: The Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab has developed the prototype AUR: a Robotic Desk Lamp. With full motion robotic arm, color changing light source and mechanical iris as a winking/blinking “eye”, this has to be the most, umm, expressive desk lamp since Pixar’s Luxo Jr.
Welcome to the first post on Lucept. Lucept is being started with grand ambitions: At first, this will be a blog dedicated to contemporary lighting with a special focus on forward-looking lighting trends. Eventually, we hope Lucept will grow into something more, injecting new life into the lighting industry.
But more on that later. Let’s see how the blog shapes up first.
Lucept's Editor on a evening stroll in front of Boston's Custom House
