Philip Ross is a Dutch designer with an industrial design education and research background spanning both TU/Delft and TU/Eindhoven. Over the years Ross has created some very interesting experiments exploring how to use various forms of touch to control (or maybe it is better phrased to shape) lighting experiences. I first covered Ross on Lucept back in 2012, when he was part of the startup Fonckel.

A couple recent projects caught my attention:

The first is Smart Light for Placemaking, where participants are allowed to “sketch” in real life with sophisticated post-top lights that appear to have many pixels of control built into the heads, allowing for live experiments with optical distribution and color of light controlled via app. What a fantastic concept for community involvement in lighting design – for the first time giving some of the freedom of experimentation that is so common in theater lighting to urban lighting projects.

The second is Theremin, a slender vertical floor lamp that deceptively conceals three zones of light (two running along the vertical length and one on the top of the fixture) that uses proximity gestures to allow someone to shape the quality of the light. What a magical effect. And a real product, too, distributed through ADS360.

Thanks Robert Van Praag for the tip!