Inspiration BS003 – look-alikes

While i had my daily look through some design blogs i came across the lamp fishermen by the Swedish architects TAF. It caught my attention because it immediately brought up a lot of varying associations reaching from dodgy fish restaurants to nice holidays at the baltic sea coast, where you can sometimes find these glass balls used by fishermen to keep the tips of their nets above the water. When i started thinking about this and how such a simple design can bring up so many stories i wondered about other designs that i had seen and remembered because of a similar link to other objects.

image by TAF Arkitektkontor

Another designer that imediatly came to my head was Julia Reischel who was a lovely flatmate of mine in Rotterdam. Her lamp Jack also got a maritime look-alike: the buoy. But it does not only takes the shape as an inspiration but also uses the tilting movement of a buoy as a mechanism to swich on and dim the light.

image by Julia Reischel

A different take on the subject was made by Mieke Meijer from Vij5 designers who did not

make a product resembling some other object but created a material that carries the aesthetics of wood and takes the ecological value even further. Her newspaper wood is made of old newspaper that is glued together and sanded to reveal the lines that are such a distinctive attribute associated with wood. It can be used almost like wood, to build furniture or anything else that is thought of.

image by Vij5