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Smoothy Task Light

lighting

A task light can be warm instead of mechanical.

Client
Gantri
Category
Lighting, residential task and table
Year
2019
Scope
Industrial design, form development, CMF
Channel
Retail & DTC

Constraint

A task light, in a category that already holds thousands of them, that a person would still find unique and memorable. Task lighting defaults to the mechanical: arms, joints, clamps, hardware in view.

The second requirement was about how it gets made. Gantri's additive manufacturing had to work to the design's advantage rather than sit underneath the object as a limitation to be worked around.

The studio's own line is "simplicity with soul," and the second half is what a task light usually loses. Strip one back and it becomes equipment. What makes it worth having on a desk is whatever survives the stripping.

Green bent-tube table lamp glowing on a floating wood nightstand beside a bed, with leaf shadows on the wall

Decision

The reference is soft serve, but not the look of it. No spiral, no ridges, nothing reproducing the texture of a cone, because a literal read would have made a novelty object. What carried over is the motion: soft serve filling a cone and folding over on itself.

What the project came down to is three dimensions. How high the diffuser sits above the surface, the angle the light leaves it at, and how wide the top has to be to house the lighting components while still reading friendly and usable rather than like equipment. Those were settled by testing rather than by drawing, through prototypes built with swappable components so different heights could be evaluated quickly.

The single fold is where it resolves, and it had to hold two things at once. The definition of the crease is what gives a soft form its edge, so the object reads friendly without reading formless. And the same geometry had to print efficiently, without demanding a mass of support material that gets thrown away.

The lighting components set the floor under all of it. A bulb needs a specific gap between itself and the inner wall, which fixes a minimum the form has to clear whatever the other three dimensions want.