We’re always happy to see a bit of experimental and homegrown Chinese industrial design; it is only by promoting young designers that that country will be able to shed their reputation as imitators. Here’s recent industrial design grad Siyu Lou’s Window portable lamp:
Intended as a bedside or reading lamp, it extends and retracts in the manner of a window shade (by rotating the knob on the side, not by pulling it). With the light source embedded within an unspecified flexible material, the user would increase the lumens by drawing the shade out further—a sort of inverse analog to an actual window shade.
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We also like that the design is context-appropriate to China’s current housing situation. With more and more folks crowding into cramped city apartments, “not everyone can possess a room with direct sunlight,” Lou writes. His lamp is meant to compensate for that. “We always associate brightness with sunshine. When the sun shines through the window in the morning, we cannot only feel the brightness, the warmth, but also something emotional, which brings peace of mind.”
Lou designed the Window as his graduation project last year, when he received his Bachelors of Industrial Design at Zhejiang University. He claims to have produced a working prototype and interestingly enough, the Window is currently up for pledges on crowdfunding platform Allocacoc.
Call me a skeptic, but I don’t believe the product is actually production-ready; I’d need to see a video of it in action. But I’m posting Lou’s project here because, as mentioned above, China needs attention drawn to their new generation of designers if they are to join the global design community in earnest. I’m not concerned about production; they’ve already got that part of the equation figured out, and now they need to develop more designers like Lou.
Source: core77