February 8, 2019

Line Goyette

Founded by Annika Hagen and Nicole Fox as a group installation and exhibition showcasing light and form through the lens of architectural design, LAMP launched an international lighting design competition in 2013 to offer designers an opportunity to engage their talents in unique conceptual explorations and to connect the local community to architecture and design.

In five competitions from 2013 to 2018, Vancouver-based LAMP — Lighting Architecture Movement Project — has honoured the best in established, emerging and student designers from around the globe. The 2018 competition may be LAMP’s last, as organizers have placed future competitions on hold indefinitely.

The competition was open to three categories of designers: Established, Emerging and Student. Each year presented a new theme and new set of guidelines to challenge entrants. The theme for 2018 was balance.

“Balance was a clever subject and we were very impressed by the diversity of lights,” says Ingo Maurer, one of the 2018 competition judges.

The 2018 first-place winners and runners-up in each category are as follows.

Established

First place — Mito by Tom Fereday and Rakumba Lighting from Melbourne, Australia
Runner-up — Boom by Stickbulb/RUX Studios from New York City, NY

Emerging

First place — Highwire by Anony Studio from Toronto, Ontario
Runner-up — Bolla by Giulia Liverani for OliveLab from Turino, Italy

Student

First place — Driftwood by Nathan Sui from Mississauga, Ontario
Runner-up — Arch by Noah Howells from Boone, North Carolina

Emerging category: the two winners — Anony Studio and OliveLab

I reached out to Anony Studio’s Christian Lo and David Ryan after they received their LAMP award, and also met with OliveLab in Turin. It’s interesting to compare their paths to lighting design.

Highwire by Anony Studio

Launched at the 2018 Interior Design Show (IDS) in Toronto, Anony Studio’s Highwire pendant has been well received by the public and design professionals alike, say co-founders Christian Lo and David Ryan. Lo and Ryan founded Anony Studio in 2015. Their first collection won “Best Collection” at the 2017 Interior Design Show.

Based in Toronto, Anony makes minimal lighting fixtures utilizing the latest technology and manufacturing processes, with an honest and timeless approach to product life cycle, use of materials, and ease of use.

What is Highwire? By allowing gravity to weight the centre, Highwire maintains balance by creating tension between two points. The user can add up to five luminaires to a single power drop. Highwire uses electrical cables to create black outlines by tracing forms into a three-dimensional space. These compositions are further enhanced by light emanating from both sides of each individual weighted mass. The light created by the fixture not only illuminates the surrounding area, but also illuminates itself, further enhancing the fixture’s presence. The life cycle and energy efficiency of Highwire is crucial. It uses LED technology and minimizes manufacturing processes.

Project specs

Highwire is composed of anodized machined aluminum and laser cut diffusers. The elegant machined parts rest on tensioned electrical cables. Having the electrical cables act as supports, allowing the fixture to frame any setting. Available in 1, 3, and 5 dimensions: small (OD6 x 1.5in / OD150 x 40mm); large (OD8 x 1.5in / OD200 x 40mm). Materials: aluminum, polycarbonate, acrylic, and styrene. Finish: anodized matte black. Electrical: 12W, 3000K, 24V LED 800Lm, 90CRI.

Highwire has also been recognized with the 2018 Darc Awards Best Decorative Chandelier award, and the 2018 Azure Awards People’s Choice in Lighting award. Highwire was also featured in the Aya Kitchen Booth at IDS 2018, which won a Silver award for its designers.

Bolla by OliveLab

In 2017, Giulia Liverani, her brother Edoardo Liverani, who does the engineering for the projects, and Marco Signoretto started a new adventure, OliveLab, a manufacturing and consultancy practice aiming to produce a new generation of lighting products. Attracted by innovations and new technologies, the co-founders of OliveLab see light as one of the most important resources of our life. “The poetic but functional aspects of lighting take us to design new projects and ﬁttings focused on the true needs of the final consumer. Putting together our creativity, ideas and experiences, we apply the same rigorous attention to context, process, material quality and detail to all our creations,” says Giulia.

What is Bolla? Balance isn’t something you easily get, it’s something you have to gain. The universe itself is constantly searching for equilibrium, balancing different elements to reach an ideal condition. Similarly, Bolla is able to constantly equilibrate power and temperature to guarantee the desired lifetime of its LED. Heat dissipation is a crucial point of development in lighting. Bolla uses a smart sensor to dimmer the power and hence the brightness depending on how much heat the surrounding element can dissipate. The result is an incredibly thin light body: without any kind of heatsink it can adapt to mutable conditions.

This system creates an unique human interaction: when the LED is inside water you have a powerful bright light, diffused by water itself. When taken outside, in the air, the light is softer and the beam become direct, using water as a natural lens.

Project specs

Total dimensions: 200 x 200 x 1000 mm. Components and materials: glass bowl 200mm, brass rods 8mm x 800mm, brass rods 6mm x 200, nylon wire, cord clock brass finishing, white aluminum ring, resin.

What is your background prior to being in the lighting industry?

Anony: “I graduated from OCAD for Industrial Design back in 2009,” explains Christian. “After graduating I worked in the furniture and product industry for a couple of years. While working in the field I started to really get interested in lighting. I started to notice that energy efficient lighting was really recognized. Because lighting plays such an important role in our everyday interactions, seeing the combination of design and technology seemed like a perfect fit.

“I started to work for a lighting company. As the company grew I started to create a design team. That’s where I met David. David was a recent graduate at Humber College in Industrial Design. He started working in marine safety equipment but then quickly switched to lighting. David really stood out to me. I noticed that David was really strong in problem solving and picked up technology very quickly. He paid close attention to how everything was built and came together. That is when we both started to realize that our design ideologies were very similar.”

OliveLab: “Both Marco and I graduated in Industrial Design and both have a Master in Product Design.” says Giulia. While Marco stayed in Turino for his Master, Giulia went to London, where she missed the Italian sun. This led her to design Sun Memories fixture, so that she could have a part of Italy always with her. The first step was designing and developing a wearable device able to record, through the use of a light sensor, the intensity and colour temperature of sunlight, for more than six hours. Thanks to an easy app interface, users can create their personal “sunlight recordings playlist,” share their “suns” with friends, and send the information to the lamp — starting the sunlight reproduction.

The software embedded in the lamp drives a power RGB LED capable of recreating daylight in all its features: colour, intensity and fickleness, from the moments of shadow to the vibrancy of a sunny day.

The final result is not a lamp that simply changes colour: the light of sun memories is alive, it continuously changes, making you feel the sun inside your own home.

What’s ahead?

Anony: “Our goal is to use energy efficient LED lighting in all of our fixtures. Not only do we want to use quality technology and components, but we wanted to create a product that everyone and anyone could experience

“At the moment we’d like to work on our existing line of lighting and expand the families. We would like to work on more collaborations with other designers and also with other creatives in different industries.”

OliveLab: “We shape a product with the shape of light we have in mind and not the reverse. The shape is outside the lamp. Since Sun memorized was a big success we decided to work with light.” (OliveLab subsequently won many awards with other lamps). “We want to make meaningful products. While we originally struggled to put a company together, we now have a supply chain for our products. It’s challenging in an industrial environment like Turino to find partners for productions in small quantities.

What lighting trends interest you most?

Anony: “For us, staying current with the technology aspect of lighting is most interesting. LED technology is constantly changing. Our studio spends a lot of time thinking about how light correlates with our health and well-being. This is something that is really important in our design process. At the moment we are focusing on how lighting temperatures and exposure can affect our natural circadian rhythm.”

Find out more about Anony Studio: www.anony.ca

OliveLab: “Light is about bringing people together, to make them feeling better. We think LED technology is a step towards something new. It gives us more possibilities to create shape with light, but light it is not only a beautiful object, it is something you interact with, and we want to go towards more interaction, more ambiance.”

Find out more about OliveLab: www.olivelab.it

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Line Goyette is Managing Editor of LDS; linegoyette@kerrwil.com