Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

Designed by Yuko Taguchi, the Wind Up Lamp is one of those concepts with layers upon layers of usefulness. Kinda like lasagna, albeit less tasty. The lamp is powered entirely by a spring driven generator; the more you wind the key, the longer the lamp will stay on. It’s obviously eco-friendly and great in a power outage, but there’s more to it than that… Since it’s wind-up, you don’t have to remember to turn out the light before going to bed. Want the light off anyway? Just unwind it. It also functions as a timer, since there’s a linear relationship between winds of the key and time lit. I’d love to know how exactly much light you get per wind, and then where I can buy one, but there don’t seem to be answers to either of those things quite yet.

[ Wind-Up Lamp ] VIA [ RFJ ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Designed by David Graas the ‘Not A Lamp’ and ‘Not A Box’ lights take the IKEA idea of flat-packed furniture and apply it to lighting instead. The ‘Not A Lamp’ is designed to sit on a table and has the silhouette of a lamp cut into a simple cardboard box while the ‘Not A Box’ is designed to hang from the ceiling and uses the outline of a light bulb with a simple shade instead.

While I like the negative image effect of both lights I suspect the ‘Not A Box’ is a bit more useful since it has a large hole on the bottom that allows the light from the bulb to shine down onto a table. The intricate pattern of the ‘Not A Lamp’ on the other hand looks like it gives off very little light. So in this case I guess form just edges out functionality.

And from what I can tell both lights come with ’some assembly required’ not to mention supplying your own bulb but I can’t imagine the instructions for putting it together are that hard to follow. The ‘Not A Lamp’ also comes in your choice of brown, orange, green or blue colors.

[ Not A Lamp & Not A Box ] VIA [ Cribcandy ]