Ascent is a table light designed for Luceplan by Norwegian designer Daniel Rybakken.
By moving the head along the stem, the light intensity goes from being turned off at the bottom position, to gradually ascending to the full light at the top. This gives the user control over not only the light intensity, but also the spread of the light.

0% light intensity                                                           10% light intensity

100% light intensity

Ascent comes in two versions, with an anchor bolt for tables, or with a base.
The anchor bolt is made impact resistant by having a co-molding of steel and rubber in the base, allowing up to 15 degree of tilt of the stem.

Ascent with base

Photographs by Luceplan

Lampshade Bulb for Booo
Front was inspired by the long life of a LED lamp. Its burning time of almost ten years makes it possible to create a lamp you never need to change the bulb of. The inner dome softens the light and creates the illusion of a lamp without a bulb, blurring the boundary between lightsource and lampshade.

Chameleon Cupboard for Porro
A colour changing cupboard. The new Chameleon unit is a magic volume, constantly opening on itself like the game of the Chinese boxes, changing appearance and revealing new finishes. To be used as a container for the bedroom or the living, it consists of a central wooden crate, covered by leather layers, which used as hinges, allows it to turn and be revolved, changing its colour and look according to the specific mood.

Surface Tension Lamp for Booo
A bubble is brief, and bursts at your touch. But while it lasts, it catches the light and reflects the room like a multi-coloured temporary structure. Front wanted to create a constantly changing lamp that combines the most ephemeral of lampshades with a LED light source that will last for 50000 hours. In the time it takes the LED to burn out, the lamp will have had 3 million different globe shades.

Gentle Chair for Porro A chair in the shape of two joined arches. Made of wood and upholstered leather.

Doodle Sofa for Moroso We doodle absent mindedly - doodling is a kind of half-conscious creative work. It is both a distraction, and also thought to help you concentrate on whatever you are doing at the same time. All three members of Front used doodles they had made during design meetings to create the sofa's pattern. The decoration is a kind of by-product of Front's creative process, inscribed onto the folded half circle of the sofa's form.

The latest lighting collaboration between Design House Stockholm and Form Us With Love is based on a simple idea. Three glass pendants are blown in Bauhaus shapes - a circle, a rectangle and a triangle.

At the heart of Form Pendants is the idea of consumers becoming involved in the design process. Form Us With Love may design the lamps, but it is the consumer who designs the installation.

Photography by Jonas Lindström

The basis consists of three blown glass forms borrowed from the light bulb, but refined to a beautiful abstraction in white with a spatial sensation.

The lamps are intended to be grouped as installations, encouraging users to explore the interplay between shapes.

© Design House Stockholm

The collaboration between Form Us With Love and Design House Stockholm has been focusing on lighting; first the 2007 Cord Lamp, then the 2009 Work Lamp, and now the 2012 Form Pendants.

Photography by Jonas Lindström

Form us with Love is a Swedish design studio located in Stockholm. The trio met on a course in product design at Karlmar University, and consists of John Löfgren, Jonas Pettersson and Petrus Palmér.

In her latest book, Judith Gura, a specialist in the history of interiors and furnishings explains the important movements (Bauhaus, Postmodernism, High Tech, and Green Design), forms, and furnishings from the 1950s to the present. Design After Modernism captures the range of influences that have spurred new ideas in design and illustrates many of the most characteristic and most innovative objects in this diverse mix.

With the first decade of the twenty-first century behind us, it is time to reassess the concept of "modern," a term that dates to the Middle Ages, when it signified current or recent events. Not until the eighteenth century did it become a stylistic term; more recently it has generally referred to the aesthetic that evolved from the Bauhaus and flourished in the mid-twentieth century. Though proclaiming freedom from the limitations of style, it became as formulaic as most of its predecessors, as Modern architecture and furnishings conformed to prescribed specifications: geometric forms, industrially fabricated, unadorned, and studiously ahistorical. 

Curiosity Kitchen, Alexander Pelikan (Netherlands) 2010
Annie, Reestore (United Kingdom) 2001 Repurposed shopping cart

Those guidelines are no longer relevant. As Midcentury Modernism has receded into history, Modernism has been redefined, reenergized, and in the process transformed. Today it embraces a cornucopia of design in an almost limitless range of materials: design studios are laboratories for experimentation; design concepts can be as important as finished objects; and furniture has crossed barriers to become a new art form. Tools and technologies never before possible have provided new approaches to decoration, and may incorporate influences from the past. The design profession has broadened its horizons; interiors and furniture are being created by architects, interior designers, furniture makers, industrial designers, artisans, artists, and even fashion designers.

Nomos Dining Table, Norman Foster (United Kingdom) 1989
Lounge Chair, Fabio Lenci (Italy) 1970

Design After Modernism offers an overview of developments in design over the past four decades-some evolutionary, some expected, and some extraordinary. It identifies the diverse influences that have generated new directions in design and illustrates many of the most characteristic, most noteworthy, and most innovative objects in this rich and variegated mix. All are representative of their time, and many of the earlier designs have already gained iconic status. Of the more recent ones, whether or not they will be admired in decades to come is something that only time will tell.

Hanging Lamp, Model SP1, Verner Panton (Denmark) 1969
Sushi III Chair, Fernando and Humberto Campana (Brazil) 2002

Book: Design After Modernism: Furniture and Interiors 1970-2010
Author : Judith Gura
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

The City of Charleroi (Belgium), initiated "Label Charleroi" an encounter between companies from the city and Belgian designers.

So far, six collaborations were successful and the result is shown in an exhibition called « Quand Charleroi pointe la technique » hosted by the Museum of Glass on the site of a former coal mine "Le Bois du Cazier".

Caterpillar, the well-known construction company for civil engineering machines, applied its techniques of cutting and bending metal to build a very versatile lamp designed by Sylvain Busine + ADA.
This lamp can be placed in a multitude of positions that allow it to be used as a desk lamp, a table lamp, an ambiant lamp, or even a book-end lamp. It can also be hung on the wall to free the space of a desk or become a bed side table lamp, small shelf, etc.. The wooden lighting module clings to any edge of the lamp with two small but very strong magnets.

Following the inspiration of designer Damien Gernay, Plastiservice, a company working with plastics, has crushed and melted vinyl records to create a new material to be manufactured as a vase for the occasion.

During its collaboration with Trans'Form, a work training company specialised in the repair of appliances, ADA (Atelier Design Addict) focused on residual waste materials and turned them into useful objects. The lamps are build from washing machine and dishwasher parts. The candleholders are made from different types of gas burners.

Amazed by the possibility to "print" transparent 3D objects, Raphaël Charles, product designer, designed a bonbonniere that Sirris, an accredited collective center in thechnological industry, achieved through the stereolithography technique.

GVK, a company in the steel sector, and Atelier Blink, an interior and product design office, focused on the development of steel production in different countries in 1910, 1960 and 2010. They present the results of their research as a "three-dimensional mapping."

A chocolate bar in the shape of a tire called "Royal United" is the result of the meeting between the technical work of ceramist Hugo Meert and Belgian chocolate factory Bruyerre.

Exhibition: Label Charleroi
From October 1 to November 27 2011
Musée du Verre - Site du Bois du Cazier - Marcinelle - Belgium

The Bouroullec brothers have presented some great new products in Milan this year.

Osso chair - Mattiazzi © studio Bouroullec
Working with Mattiazzi is comparable to working with an organic farm. While being a small, family-owned company that has been manufacturing chairs for others since about forty years, Mattiazzi decided to do less yet better. By using sophisticated CNC set of tools and at the same time a greatly refined manual know-how, Mattiazzi has a hybrid way to consider furniture production. We were particularly interested by the fact that all the equipment is powered by solar energy and that the wood is coming from the surrounding areas to be carefully selected without the use of any chemical treatments. They came back to the basics and this is precisely what piqued our interest and our fascination for the Mattiazzi family's endeavour. As designers, we feel involved in supporting such valiant microstructures that are always on the edge as they try to adjust to a constantly changing market. That said, the Osso chair had to be the illustration of what Mattiazzi is in its roots. We designed an object in plain wood but not in regular plain wood, the quality of the wood literally makes the object, like the best piece of meat would make the refinement of a dish. Our intention was to let the sensuality of the wood material - from oak to maple to ash - express itself. The Osso chair invites to be touched, even caressed as it is extremely sculpted and polished thanks to the use of highly sophisticated digital control equipment. The high-tech assembling system of geometrical wood panels allows a quite singular strength while preserving a design balance of the object.


Piani Lamp - Flos © flos
The Piani collection is made of a flat base and a flat top. The base is either a tray so that objects can be displayed in a triangular beam of light as if they were on stage or in its longer version, a shelve so that more objects can be supported by this hybrid design. Piani comes in plastic as well as in oak wood and basalt stone in the shelving versions so that different sensual experiences are suggested.


Aim Lamp - Flos © flos
The general idea behind the Aim design is to propose a lamp that would offer an infinite variety of adjustments to meet one's lighting needs. We came up with a proposal of a new typology of lamp that naturally positions itself in the space - like a plant would do - thanks to the long cables which facilitate the orientation and the height of the light freely. This object in ABS is the industrial version of the Lianes that we presented at the kreo Gallery, Paris in 2010.


Baguettes chair - Magis © studio Bouroullec
With Baguettes, our intention was to design a chair that would be brought down to its minimum, using the least quantity of material and assembling items. The ply wood seat and back parts of the chair are supported by four very thin sticks in solid wood which are maintained together by a structure in injected aluminium that is almost invisible. The back of the chair, like the blade of a knife, subtly comes into the main frame while guaranteeing high support resistance. As the Baguette table that we designed for Magis in 2010, we wanted this chair to be as light as possible, to almost float in the space as if it would stay on its feet by magic.


Oiseau - Vitra © studio Bouroullec