Every year, Time Magazine collects some of the best inventions from all over the world. This year, the Flower Lamp from Sweden's Interactive Institute's design research project STATIC!, is one of the nominees.
The Flower Lamp is one of 11 designs in which a research team have explored how design can encourage people to use less energy in their home. The Flower Lamp is actually a display for ones electricity consumption. It doesn’t show how many watts you’re consuming right now, but rather the overall trend in your consumption. If the household has a decreasing trend of electricity use, the Flower lamp rewards you by slowly opening up to "bloom". If, on the other hand, use is increasing, the lamp folds its petals together. Thus the lamp, in terms of both light and form, is reflecting the cycles of local energy use in a subtle and poetic way that makes smaller sacrifices of heat and warm water, worthwhile. In order to make the lamp more beautiful, a change of behavior is needed.
STATIC! is a design research project led by the Interactive Institute that was actually active between 2004-2005 but has proved so successful that it still receives lots of attention worldwide today. The design research project was funded by the Swedish Energimyndigheten and led by the Interactive Institute. Partners include Front (Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren, Katja Sävström in collaboration with Sofia Stattin and Göran Nordahl), HDK School of Design and Crafts at Göteborg University, Ludvig Svensson AB, Mälardalen University, Swedish Industrial Design Foundation (SVID) and the Swedish School of Textiles at the University College of Borås.
The Interactive Institute is an experimental IT-research institute that creates results through combining art, design and technology. The institute consists of different research groups that each have a unique orientation but where the fundamental idea is that the combination of different disciplines will create new results and new ways of working. Examples of orientations are: games, sound, energy, interactive film, youth culture and learning. The Interactive Institute is based in Stockholm but some of the research groups have separate bases in Piteå, Gothenburg, Eskilstuna and Växjö.
Interactive Institute
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