Artemide Huara Table lamp

At first, light available to humans came only from stars: the sun and its reflection on the moon.‎ For millennial mankind accepted its incapacity to see in the dark and adapted consequently to the natural rhythm of the celestial spheres, of dawn and dusk.‎ But such agreement changed about 2 million years ago.‎ The appearance of the controlled use of fire marked the beginning of the search for how to transform night into day at will.‎ But getting light from burning stuff was very inefficient (it heated more than illuminated) and uncomfortable (pollution due to smoke).‎ Then about some 70 thousand years ago, light began to come from burning fuel: animal fat first, oil or wax then, or gas and kerosene more recently not only allowed a more efficient use of energy but also introduced the need for a more specific design of the light’s source.‎ The appearance of electrical power at the turn of the last century started a technological development that irrespective of the scientific principle employed to produce light (incandescent, fluorescent or metal halides), made any other source of energy almost disappear.‎ The next step in the production of light came with the development of Light Emitting Diodes (LED).‎ For the first time, light shifted from the electrical realm to the field of electronics.‎ But for some reason such revolutionary step has not permeated society; people look for lights and lamps in the white goods section, not in the electronics section.‎ Our project for Artemide is about integrating the first and the last moment in the history of light: celestial spheres with electronics.‎ On the one hand we want light to vary its intensity and direction according to phases more than moving pieces of a mechanism.‎ On the other hand, we want to aknowledge the fact that the future of light is electronic, not electric.‎ The distinctive potential of electronics is its capacity to carry information that allow for multiple ways of interaction, such as a tactile screen.‎ So, our project is a low voltage, moveable, dark sphere intuitively activated by touch.‎ Hence the name Huara, the aymarà word for star.‎ Aymarà is the native population of the Acatama desert, the driest and darkest one in the world.‎ In other words, the place from where one can see more stars in the planet; no wonder that by 2020, 70 % of the cutting edge astronomical observation capacity of the planet will be in the land of Aymarà.‎