HIMACS at the London Design Festival

HIMACS is on display during the London Design Festival, at the “Re-Considering Canon” exhibition.  

This exhibition presents a series of newly commissioned work within the context of current perceptions of design canon. Design canon is a term used in museum curation to describe both a collection of specifically selected design objects, and the set of criteria by which these objects are judged.

The curators selected objects or topics that they consider to be part of design canon, and invited nine designers represented by Gallery FUMI to respond. Designers including Max Lamb, Glithero, Thomas Lemut, Sam Orlando Miller, Tuomas Markunpoika, Study O Portable, Johannes Nagel, Alex Hull will be contributing works.

Designers from Glithero have chosen HIMACS in the colour Dark Night and copper for their ‘Domino light’, which is a table light that is switched on using a rally of conductive copper dominos.

The dominos can be arranged in any configuration as long as the rally starts and finishes at the base of the light. When the dominos fall, an electrical circuit is completed which switches on the light. There is a ‘rocker’ domino in the base of the lamp to start the rally and a ‘receiver’ domino to mark where it finishes. Within the light there is a space to store dominos that are not in use. As the brief was to respond to the incandescent light bulb which is a bit of a champion, the designers thought it appropriate to include a classic Edison light bulb and design it on a HIMACS base, which acts as insulator, to make it look like a trophy.

‘We chose to play with the moment leading up to when the light switches on, to make it less instantaneous and to make tangible the relationship between electricity and materials’ explain the designers.

The image of a classic light bulb floating above one’s head is also symbolic of the formation of an idea - a Eureka moment.

The exhibition will be open to the public from 15th to 23rd September 2018