BackThis saying, seemingly obvious, is the result of a process that combines design and social awareness. It was brought to light in 2013 through a competition concerned about a global issue that affects us all. The Madrid-based team of the industrial designer Álvaro Catalán de Ocón raised the question of what second life there could be for the familiar PET plastic bottle. In so heterogeneous a world as ours, few examples could be found, but this receptacle knows nothing about cultures.
Inspiration drawn from a Japanese kitchen utensil led to a manual operation that transfromed the rigid structure of PET bottles into fibers with a shared nucleus. These fibers could be intertwined, tied, or combined with other materials, yielding a new product. The next step was to dream of those materials and the laws that govern their makeup.
While the soul of the PET Lamp is woven in distant countries, the final details that make them come alive are done in a Madrid workshop. The precision required of an electric device is only possible to achieve with reliably designed, resistant pieces. But when craftsmanship and industrial design – two different disciplines – meet, they have to speak in the language of the former. The result is a delicate assembly of individually beautiful pieces which at the same time has the precision of a Swiss watch.
On 15 December the PET Lamp family welcomes a very special member. Ramingining, an Australian indigenous community that inhabits landscapes of dense vegetation, was selected to carry out a design that had no previous examples. The remote location and a culture where family ties follow undecipherable rules were the main elements used in producing the first combined screen of the collection.
