Walking Away with a Free Tom Dixon Lamp
by Leonora Oppenheim, London, UK on 09.20.07
There are lots of fun things about the London Design Festival: exhibitions, parties, free drinks, hob-knobbing with beautiful and talented people, but still none of these top the feeling I had yesterday as I walked away from Trafalgar Square clutching a large cardboard box. There might be no such thing as a free lunch, but apparently there is such a thing a free limited edition lamp by Tom Dixon. This celebrated British designer has taken to creating installations with an eco-design twist at the London Design Festival and then giving it all away at the end. Last year it was the great 'chair grab' when 500 people took one of Dixon's recyclable polystyrene chairs home. This year it was 1000 post consumer recycled plastic lamps and CFL bulbs being handed out to a mixture of dedicated design junkies and bemused passersby. Unduly generous or just a great marketing exercise? Dixon says it's to give low energy bulbs an image make over. Either way it's fun to watch and fun to take part in. It's a buzz to walk away with a good piece of sustainable design under your arm. Thanks Tom! :: Tom Dixon
Freebies still excite me, especially when they're well designed... but we must remember two things:
1) Free shit is still more shit. (more consumption, more energy, more waste, etc.)
2) "500 people took one of Dixon's recyclable polystyrene chairs home" I don't ever want to see "recyclable" and "polystyrene" in the same sentence. It is an extremely difficult (toxic) material to recycle, and is thus not commonly recycled. This chair is NOT "good design."