As architect and designer Oki Sato points out, ‘fun’ hides in the word ‘function’. He founded the renowned design studio, nendo, in Tokyo, which designed the new Tomoshi Portable, achieving just that by making indoor lighting convenient and fun.
Oki Sato and nendo first collaborated with Louis Poulsen on the NJP lamp in 2015, which also bears fun and functional elements. As with the NJP series, you see their love of minimalism in Tomoshi, yet the design process was very different this time, Sato says:
“It’s different designing a portable lamp from a pendant or a floor lamp that are more part of the environment and the room, in a way. A portable light is more personal, I would say, because you carry it around with you and spend time with it.”
With Tomoshi, the starting point was to understand this new kind of lighting, which Sato finds more emotional. At nendo, they needed to figure out a way of not controlling the light, but to be with it, carrying it around and living together with light.
The fun and function of Tomoshi began with inspiration from a classic tulip-shaped lantern form. Initially, Sato explains, his idea was to make a kind of torch; later, he moved on to a lantern-like lamp that enabled you to hold and place the lamp, using a leather strap. After that, the design team began making the lamp more comfortable and cosy.
"Tomoshi stands out due to its simplicity and practicality, yet it's the details that make it special. It's the flat button, its clicking sound and the feel, when you dim the light, for instance, and the matte smooth finish of the leather strap and the body of the lamp," Oki Sato says.
