Furniture and lighting are more or less the bread and butter of an industrial design blog (though these days, we might extend the metaphor to include other grains—products = pasta, technology = rice, etc.)... which is to say that they're always there, even when, say, Apocalypse dominates the headlines. Besides the major furniture and design fairs (more on that below), the Year in Furniture included a Standing Desk Shootout and a comprehensive six-part interview with Brooklyn-based manufacturers (literally hand-makers) Hellman-Chang... in addition to the usual weird and wacky designs that are fit to publish.
The age-old material of wood is as good a place to start as any: in 2011, it served as a medium for left-field commentary, a subtractive panton, a crazy curve, a plywood pod and nest-esque warping. Similarly, reclaimed materials took on various forms: preserved to polished, de-militarized or simply turned sideways.
Lighting
Lamps, more than any other object, looked like "other things"... including the lampshade itself, which inspired several skeuomorphic lighting designs: the cluster-like "TamTam" ceiling lamp, the futuristic "LED Shade Lamp," the humble "Sympathy for the Bulb" and Light Light's ever-popular levitating lamps. (We also saw functional abat-jours in glass and steel, among other materials.)
As for other other things, some of our favorites lamps took the form of an open-ocean predator, a pair of fly kicks and a maritime marker. They also took more abstract biomorphic forms, 3D printed or otherwise.
Indoor lighting also converged with upcycling in 2011: designers reinvented plumbing fixtures as steampunk lighting (twice over), while some designers transformed recyclable materials into elegant pendant lamps and minimalist desk lamps.
Still, the truly illuminating Liter of Light project, developed by students at MIT, is probably the most significant—i.e. socially impactful—lighting designs we saw in 2011.
Chairs
The chair, on the other hand, was subject to dozens of material explorations: aluminum wire, cork, laser-cut steel, Twintex, recycled PET bottles, piano keys, circuit board, salvaged signage and even empty space itself. A chair made of discarded candy wrappers turned out to be as tasteful (if not as tasty) as one made of candy.
