Design students share ideas on using lighting waste
Students of design have turned their attention to how lighting companies can reuse the waste from manufacturing luminaires.
Ideas included dramatic sculptures, a range of food bags made from recycled fabrics and cables and a catalogue of semi-finished lighting products made from waste materials.
Young people from the Elisava University School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona worked with local brand LAMP Lighting to consider creative ideas for upcycling superfluous material.
The sustainability workshop was part of the school’s Master’s Degree course in Product Design and Development.
In this workshop, which brought together the concepts of design and circularity, the students’ objective was to develop projects that would transform the waste material generated at Lamp into a completely new product, feeding it back into the industrial supply chain and enhancing the value of material that would otherwise end up as waste.
The students had the opportunity to develop projects that transcended the academic environment and that were set in a real working environment, with the same conditions, requirements, and challenges that an industrial design professional would face today.
The workshop concluded with a presentation of four projects that addressed the stated challenge: to include specific solutions for the recovery and revaluation of waste material, from a variety of different approaches:
-The first project developed a highly experimental work, taking Andreu Carulla’s work as inspiration and a starting point, submitting a proposal based on research into a variety of cardboard recycling processes, which included several prototype proposals;
-The second project followed the principle of ‘Designing a product that can be used by all workers on an equal basis, and one which forms part of a dynamic that promotes a better quality of social life at work’, and designed and manufactured a prototype of a bag for carrying food, made from recycled fabrics and cables;
– ‘Manual of Solutions for Non-Designed Objects’ offers a reflection on how the combination of a variety of simple materials can be transformed into a conceptually complex sculptural object in order to ‘bring the brand image closer to the people, with the aim of creating a link between the company and the user’.
-The last team presented their research into cables and sheets and how to integrate them to create new products, demonstrating the potential of this research into how to reintroduce these waste materials back into the industry.
The workshop gave the students the opportunity to work with industrial design projects that provide solutions to the real problems and challenges faced by a lighting company, namely sustainability.
For Lamp, this initiative, in addition to providing a specific and practical solution to promote circularity in the company, is aligned with its strategic focus.
• Remanufacturing Lighting is the subject of a special one-day conference organised by Recolight and taking place on Thursday 27 April 2023 at the Coin Street Conference Centre in London. This CPD-approved event will give you the tools, insights and contacts make a success of luminaire reconditioning and reuse. You’ll learn how to sell the concept of reconditioned lights, develop best practice policies, comply with the standards, set up a testing regime for reused luminaires and remanufacture fittings at scale. The gathering will also give you inspiration from real world projects which prove that remanufacturing can be a success everyone. You’ll also meet key players in the remanufacturing industry network with specifiers with the power to get your products into projects. See more HERE.
