We're not sure how things are today in pre-school and primary education institutes, but when we were young every child regularly made a lantern by cutting some slits in a piece of paper, rolling it to a tube, and then squashing it a little.
Which is a very simple, and slightly derogatory, certainly unfair, manner via which to describe the lamp, lantern, Excito by Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts' student Tea Gluvačević.
For not only is there nothing in the least childish about Excito but whereas the lanterns the juvenile us built were, as a general rule, decorative rather than functional — mixing flame and paper wasn't any better an idea then than it is now — Tea's lantern is very functional. In a great many definitions of the word.
Developed in context of an Industrial Design semester project the quintessence, the joy, the magic, of Excito is that is not only height adjustable, but width adjustable: squash Excito and it becomes a low, fat lamp; raise it back towards its full height and it becomes a tall, slim lamp. A transformability that explains the thin PVC strips of its shade/corpus.
A construction principle that also means that as Excito rises and falls the gaps between the thin PVC strips of its shade/corpus become larger and smaller, wider and thinner, straighter and curveder, thereby altering the agency of the light emitted and thus the atmosphere of the space in which it stands.
Or at least we suspect, presume, the light and atmosphere change as Excito rises and falls: sadly it wasn't plugged in when we were at Zagreb Design Week. It had a plug. But wasn't positioned anywhere near a socket. We saw the problem. But apparently no-one else did. Or if they did couldn't develop a solution. Despite, in our assessment of the situation, the solution being easier to arrive at than the illumination with candles of our childhood paper laterns would have been. And a failure to unite plug and socket that is and was a shame because how a lamp illuminates a room is a key component of any and every lamp design. And especially the design of a lamp such as Excito whose changing illumination is surely one if its key features. A changing illumination we'd imagine is also a fluctuating light; any movement of the the surrounding air will, we suspect, invariably lead to movement of the PVC strips and thus of the play of light and shadow cast by Excito. We imagine, suspect, presume, having never seen Excito illuminated.
If a lack of illumination that allowed one to appreciate the manner in which Excito, almost regardless of how squashed or erect it is/was, references the calm, unhurried, stringently silhouetted classical forms of the amphorae of Antiquity; a visual ease, and visual familiarity, that should allow it to contribute to any space whether illuminated or not. To be, in contrast to out lanterns, decorative and functional.
A contribution in the illuminated state Tea proposes expanding via enabling the addition of transparent coloured discs to the base which would allow Excito to shine in a number of non-white hues; an extension that although we appreciate the why, would query the wherefore. It strikes us as an unnecessary extension of the concept. But as ever, what do we know? How many lamps have we designed? Does the ability to change the colour of the illumination become important, interesting, desirable if you increase Excito from a table lamp to a floor lamp?
The latter a question that reminds that Excito is not only a work as simple, intuitive and formally pleasing as our childhood lanterns, a highly communicative character that seeks to contribute to a space without dominating or commandeering that space for their own purposes, but that as presented at Zagreb Design Week Excito is very much a work in progress, was, essentially, a prototype, which is and was fine: as ever, student projects are always about, and must always be about, what the individual student gets and got from the process and experience, not that which results from the process and experience. Are about the student not the result. The result is in many regards an irrelevance.
Which doesn't mean they can't be charming and engaging, and certainly doesn't mean they can't take on a new existence and a new life after leaving the university laboratory. A new future self Excito may not have, there are a goodly few challenges to be overcome, but having experienced Excito in Zagreb we're excitantur, and looking forward to seeing, where Tea takes it from here.
And where we next meet the project.
As far as we can ascertain Tea Gluvačević has no website, but her Facebook profile can be found @teyci.tee
More details on Zagreb Design Week can be found at https://zagrebdesignweek.com
