Spontaneous Lamps is an ongoing, ad hoc project: something in the house needs a lamp, so whatever’s around gets gathered into one. Five-gallon buckets, bricks and rocks pulled from a rubble heap in an alley, bamboo cut down and cleared from the yard, the guts of a clip-on painter’s light pulled apart and rewired into something else — once, even the lamp’s own cord doubling as part of a tensegrity structure, just to hold a reading light over someone’s shoulder in a rocking chair, for a few hours.
Built to come back apart
Each lamp is built so it can stop being a lamp just as easily as it started being one. When the need passes, the parts go back to being a bucket, a rock, a bamboo pole — or head out to the garden or the compost pile — instead of staying stuck together as something only useful once. It’s a direct extension of the same question The Sustainabilitist Principles asked years earlier: what if a design didn’t exist?
Six lamps and counting
There have been six of these so far — built at school, at home, for colleagues along the way. It’s an ongoing, informal set of outcomes rather than a single finished object; the next one starts whenever the next need does.