Studying the kaleidoscopic effects of lightings on shadows, Spectra is a lamp made from a combination of different geometric translucent and opaque origami folds, designed to be modular and adaptable as a table, wall and decorative lamp. By folding and combining Spectra in different configurations, it creates different lighting and shadow effects.

When hung on a wall, it looks like a flower. When combined, Spectra create the illusion of a durian. Even when folded by itself, it is a decorative light piece for the festive season.

Spectra – A simple origami lighting design, which can evolve into different personas for different occasions.

About the Designer

Graduating from the Industrial Design faculty from the National University of Singapore, Sharon Goh has worked as an industrial designer for 2 years in Inovasia Design Centre

The work that she has done has won her design accolades, which include winning a “Laureate” Award at an International Students’ Environmental Design Competition – Designing a Sustainable Future held in Belgium in 2006, and an internship grant to work with Toshiyuki Kita, the chairman of the Good Design Awards in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan in 2005. Her design works were also exhibited in Eco-Fair 2006, as part of products featured in the launch for “Eco-Home of the Future”.

Other than her love for environmental design, she also enjoys researching into design and business management to further understand the world around her.

Popularity: 57% [?]

The inspiration for the d°light design is sunlight. Sunlight not only represents warmth and light, it also creates happiness, joy, playfulness, intimacy and life itself; essentially, it is the essence of people’s everyday lives. The concept embodied in d°light is to create a light that captures the essences of sunlight, but condensed into something with which people can create a close relationship.

D°light Huggable is a furry fabric cover wrapped around a series of 12 LED lights embedded within silicone bubbles. The silicone acts as a diffuser for the LED lights. The natural color of the silicone material is translucent white. When lit with warm, white LED lamps, the technology creates a warm and comforting glow that represents sunlight. The tactile quality of the silicone also mimics the feeling of a living creature, and d°light Huggable almost hugs back as you hold it.

D°light Huggable can be powered by four AA batteries or a 4.5 volt AC adaptor and can be turned on and off by pulling the chain switch.

About the Designer
Diana Lin received her BA in Architecture Design in University of Colorado at Boulder and MFA in Industrial Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. Lin worked on several projects, including consulting jobs and an international lighting design competition. Initially, she struggled with the lighting design project, as she was feeling overwhelmed and desperately needed to unwind. She ventured outside to lay the grass under the warmth of the sun. Unfortunately, however, Rochester, NY is a place where sunshine is scarce, so Diana did not get the sunlight she desperately needed. This specific experience, though, inspired her to create her award winning light, the d°light Huggable.

For more information regarding Diana Lin and her works, please visit www.dianalindesign.com or e-mail her at diana@dianalindesign.com.

Popularity: 31% [?]

The ClampLight offers flexibility where the light can be fastened anywhere around the desk, offering an alternative ambient display light fitting. More importantly, the design is compact and space saving. The lamp can be used at the bed-side, or placed along book shelves, proving itself to be both functional and yet decorative. The inclusion of the handle design also makes one yearn to carry and handle the light.

A one-piece integral hinge shell and a screw are the 2 basic components of the ClampLight. The choice of energy saving compact fluorescent lamp conserves energy and emitting no heat. The product measures about the size of a standard A4 book. The lamp is currently available as a working prototype and open for production and retail.

The ClampLight – redefining the way you live and work.

About the designer

Eujin Pei is an award-winning London-based Singaporean Industrial Designer who has worked for several major design consultancies and has undertaken work for clients such as Motorola and Fusion Design.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Karter is a safe food packet opener with the blade tucked away within the housing, away from the reaches of the fingers.

The design of the kitchen pack opener was inspired by the popular 70’s game Pac-man. Its design had arisen from the need to create a cutting utensil that is high on safety yet simple to use.

The use of a surgical steel blade within the housing means that it would not require any sharpening as long as it is used for its intended purpose, which is to cut only plastic or paper packaging and freezer bags.

About the Designer
Abdul Rashid is currently a freelance industrial design consultant whose area of speciality is in the redesigning of kitchen utensils and user centred designs. He is contactable through email : xp1151@msn.com

Popularity: 37% [?]

Inspired by the semantic values of shells, Escargot is actually a water fountain that has a specially designed sensor system to detect the frequency of music. By sensing the different bass and treble frequencies of music, various ripple and colorful lighting effects are then intuitively created.

Escargot is an original concept that has been specially designed, engineered and sculpted by Mr Chung Ching Kiat himself, taking two years to complete it. And when it was first launched in the Singapore Garden Festival in January 2007, it drew the attention of many people and companies to want to feature “Escargot” for their events too. Currently he is working different versions of Escargots to create more varied concepts.

Escargot is truly a very interactive design that provides a very visual entertainment for the eyes and ears.

About the Designer

Mr Chung Ching Kiat is a fiberglass designer who has been doing design work for over 30 years. With no formal training in design at all, Uncle Chung had a very determined passion to learn sculpting artworks when he was 20. He self-taught himself sculpting and started creating sculptural works which include life-sized deities and Chinese mythical creatures, that require intricate detailing.

Due to the increasing demands for industrial design prototypes in Singapore in recent years, so he was first approached by many students to help build actual models of their designs. Being recognized for his high quality fiberglass design, he was subsequently approached by many famous designers and schools who approach him for design support.

Today, he had modelled many great design works of famous designers like Patrick Chia, Jason Ong and award winning works done by students.

Popularity: 34% [?]

This is a book about life and spirit, which the reader can nurture plants, as well read a book simultaneously. You get to water and take care of your plants everyday as you see the book, which brings about a different and unique experience. Turning static words about life in the book into a process, this planting and reading experience is enhanced. No high technology or no special material is required. Simply, this exemplifies the true meaning of life, which is hidden in the sentences between the shadows cast by the plants in the sunshine.

Books are always considered as static objects in people’s mind, transferring feeling through words, pictures and imagination they produce. So to break this traditional impression, the semantic design values of the following prose – florilegium, which means “book on life”, is embedded into this product design. People can plant whatever they like in the left side of the book, to care for it and watch it grow. During this process, readers not only learn the meaning of life, but also create life themselves.

Readers can also plant seeds in the grids according to the picture pixels. The key to designing the pictures or letters by oneself and plant it – this book would be a unique gift for everybody.

About the Designer

Eric graduated from Industrial Design program in a Chinese university located in Nanjing, which is a big city near Shanghai. After taking charge of a family company that was specialized in producing and exporting electronic products for US market, he revamped “a factory with a design department” into “a design company with a factory” in mind. This made his company able to handle product service from design and manufacturing to export entirely. So in the developing process, design becomes an important consideration over other conventional process considerations.

Now he is pursuing his master degree in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

“Find an unexpected but simple way” is his design principle.

Popularity: 39% [?]

This TIWE watch was inspired from the impressionistic memories of my childhood, The Starry Starry Night, It’s fantastic and supernatural.

This digital watch uses an OLED display to imitate the universe and celestial body to recreate the way time is interpreted through playing with the spatial watch arrangement. The white round dots run randomly in space when not in use. When you want to know what’s the time, just shake it or hit the glass surface slightly and the time will show.

About the Designer

An industrial designer from China, Lv Zhongfang was born in 1980,graduated from Northwestern Polytechnic University (China) in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree and worked as a industrial designer for 4 years. like to design wide range of products and also have strong will to discover the Chinese aesthetics.
Website: http://www.lvzhongfang.com
E-mail: lvzhongfang@gmail.com

Popularity: 47% [?]

Putting fitness into furniture … …

Nowadays, exercise is as much a fitness activity as a lifestyle routine. Yet, most fitness equipment remains mechanical and brutal, jarring out of contemporary home interiors. Backflip was born out of the quest in answering this contradiction – putting the functions of fitness into a gracious piece of furniture.

One side is used like a normal chaise lounge, while flipping it 180 degrees unveils a fitness surface based on the Pilates Spine Corrector, where one can do a variety of core and stretching exercises, such as crunches, back extension etc. Through a simple maneuver, you can simply turn a furniture piece into fitness equipment!

As an exploratory concept piece, Backflip also hopes to introduce the notion of grace and beauty in fitness equipment. After all, those are often the goals of exercising for many people – so why aren’t the equipment themselves inspiring?

About the Designer
When it came to the time to select the course for university, KK shaded on the ‘industrial design’ oval even though he didn’t know what it was about. The brochure claimed it was a synergy of design, engineering and business – which seemed interesting enough for a creative generalist like him. And it was.

KK thinks of himself as a hybrid blend of the analytical and the creative. In a time where strategic design thinking is touted as the best thing since sliced bread, that might be quite useful indeed. He is currently an industrial designer in Orcadesign, a design consultancy in Singapore. In his free time, KK rummages, digs and sifts through all things intriguing, clever and curious online, and stow them in Gems Sty, a blog on design and other interesting tidbits. You can also find him at sunboar@gmail.com.

Popularity: 42% [?]

ZHU is inspired by two aspects of green: green as ecological and green as image of bamboo plant.

Processed solid bamboo is chosen as the material because of its environmentally friendly and renewable nature. To truly express the beauty of this material, the design aims to abstract the quality of bamboo.
Weaving in an Asian spirit, the coffee table resonates with an abstract pattern that stirs images of bamboo – the inspiration of nature. The pattern echoes the form of bamboo forest, at the same time creates slots for an extra function: book holder.

The resultant product is a poetic interpretation and abstraction of an Asian element into a piece of modern furniture, which is unique, appealing and functional.

Be inspired by nature and be protective of it.

Awards:

1. Best use of wood Award
2. Furniture Design Award 2007 : Young Designer Merit

About the Designer

Lui Honfay is architecturally-trained, currently working full-time as an architect. Though he has serious passion for architecture, he constantly feels restricted and uninspired if he is bounded to just architecture. During the process, his area of interests is broaden, and believes that a good designer has to be an all-rounder, being able to explore design fundamentals and brainstorm for creative ideas and apply these ideas into different design aspects. Hence he tries out different design works and continues to learn. To him, there is no difference between architecture, interior design and product design. They are all DESIGN and inter-related with each others.

He believes design is only valuable if we do something different from others.

Email: honfay@yahoo.com

Popularity: 53% [?]

As the confrontational title suggests, sheets of smoke-coloured acrylic are impaled by beech poles to construct a shelf.

However this simplicity is achieved by a meticulous technique of programming the components to fit.

First a small hole is made in the acrylic sheet and is heated for an exact duration. The wooden pole is then pushed through sheet by sheet. When the plastic cools down, it contracts around the pole to create a vice-like grip. This is repeated, resulting in a strong and stable structure.

Therefore this product is about bringing joinery back into the foreground, where the honesty and technique of process makes the Design.

About the Designer

Hunn Wai (1980) has just graduated from the IM Masters programme of the renowned Design Academy Eindhoven, under the direction of DROOG Design co-founder Gijs Bakker.

He also received the inaugural DesignSingapore Council’s Overseas Scholarship to study at the Academy.

Hunn has also exhibited twice (2004, 2006) at the Tokyo Design Week, under sponsorship and aid from DesignSingapore and ANT Design. Products developed for those events are currently being developed for production under the ANT label.

His “Paul Smith Pingpong Table” was featured in the publication of leading London-based trends-forecasting agency The Future Laboratory.

Hunn is interested in the possibilities and stories created from colliding/joining/fusing of samples taken from all facets of contemporary culture we live in.He believes in hands-on craft-like experimentation as well as modern techniques garnered from his Industrial Design background; after all they are just tools and processes for pushing things to the next level.

He lives by the Singlish motto: “Scared Don’t Do, Do Don’t Scared.”.

Hunn can be contacted by email: info@hunnwai.com and his website: www.hunnwai.com

Popularity: 66% [?]