“We all could use a little sun indoors.” A. Castiglione

For our project, we were given the Giovi Lamp, Achille Castiglioni’s classical design lamp for FLOS, to re-design in an interactive way. The original lamp, designed in 1982, was an ambient light giving out a radiating striped pattern, resembling the sun. Along with its physical shape, this specific characteristic of its light were the essential features of the lamp. Therefore, we decided to take these as our base values and build upon these characteristics.

Conceptually, the Giovi lamp operates as a simple lamp whose brightness and color can be changed with hand gestures.  For changing the brightness, the user has to squeeze or expand the light. So, as the person moves his both hands closer to or further from the lamp, the brightness of the lamp is decreased or increased. This way, the control gives you the feeling of physically controlling the light. The user can change the light color while turning a hand in a circle around the lamp. This is natural in the sense of turning a color wheel.

Rotation of the hands around the lamp imitates the movement of a color wheel, creating a change in the color of the lamp. The adjustment of the brightness is provided by movement of the hands closer to or further away from the lamp. This gesture gives a feeling of physical expansion or compression of the light radiating out from the lamp.