Umbrella Clouds and Foot Traffic Generators: All in a day's work

It is a regular occurrence for a designer to take an idea for a design, draw up the sketches and produce the product. However, it is pure genius to take a conventional item of no apparent significance, and transform it into an awe-inspiring design. This is the case with Steven Haulenbeek's Cumulus light canopy, modern lighting at its finest. The concept behind this masterpiece, as Steven puts it, is that design resides all around us, but most of us don't see the actual vision. In the Cumulus Light Canopy, umbrella's are turned upside down covering the lights that shine through them. This gives the room a "recontexualized, playful light," that resembles a seemingly transparent cloud-cover. No longer is an umbrella just a one-dimensional tool for those dreary days. Not at all, and as you see in these pictures, there is nothing dark or rainy about the Cumulus Light Canopy.
Another really cool design that Haulenbeek is working on is called the Piezo floor. The concept is that there is unharvested energy all around us that we can utilize. Every day, busy train or bus stations overflow with people rushing to get to work or catch that early train to head home. By creating a large scale floor mat with embedded piezoelectric polymers to trap the generated energy from that foot traffic, that energy can be then stored and converted to light the station throughout the night. It is stored into a battery and then converted to be able to easily light up a major public area. How cool is that? A secondary goal for the project is to create energy awareness and make people cognizant of individual contributions. Now more than ever, this is all too important.I'm going to leave things off with a cool quote from Steven Haulenbeek that sums up his general designer worldview:

"Sometimes it seems like we already have everything we need and maybe we should stop designing and start realizing what we already have. We just have to open our eyes and our minds and like a chemist create the concoction that will render something entirely new."

Right on.


Source and pictures: Sevenhaulenbeek.com