The best designers of the red dot design award 2007: Fernando Prado

For the outstanding design of the pendant luminaire “Bossa” Fernando Prada received in this year`s red dot award: product design a red dot: best of the best. red dot online talked to the designer about his award, his product and the idea behind it.

What inspired you to create this particular product and what was the intention behind it?

I had some inspirations to create the Bossa lamp, such as the forms of nature, the brazilian way of life and the brazilian music. The main intention behind Bossa was to create not only a product but an experience for the user through the interaction between product and people.

What does being awarded with the “red dot: best of the best” mean to you?

This award is very important to me, because I feel like a representative of the brazilian design, and it is an honor for me to do it in this very important award, it is a proof of quality for brazilian design.

What particular challenges do you think designers have to face these days?

I believe that we have two main challenges,  to create products which are environmentally friendly and to make design accessible to the masses.

As a designer, what would you still like to accomplish in the future?

I would like to keep designing products in order to improve people’s lives.

What do you think is the economic significance of design?

I believe design has a fundamental economic role in the world, as we have to create products that are easy and cheap to produce. Such products also have to be financially feasible and at the same time competitive in the global marketplace.

Changing light – the symbiosis of form and function

The natural light of our environment is highly differentiated and changes continuously – daylight is a combination of different wavelengths of varied intensity and thus hardly ever stays constant. According to our activities during the day we tend to vary and deliberately reduce the intensity of daylight – we use curtains, blinds or even sunshades. A functionally designed luminaire has to simulate natural light and, ideally, allows us to easily vary and individually adjust the intensity of its artificial illumination. The Bossa pendant luminaire was designed to offer such adaptability and highly useroriented variability. For this purpose its design was focused on a simple form, which according to its designer Fernando Prado aims at allowing the user to “interact” with it in an easy-to-understand manner. An important aspect of its design has been to lend it effective glare control, which can be adjusted to suit the user’s needs. This glare control consists of a reflector and an aluminium disc in the lower part of the luminaire. This disc also serves as a counter-weight when the reflector is moved. This design thus made further elements unnecessary, elements which would have obtruded the uniform language of form. Through both the possibility to change between direct and indirect illumination and the mechanical adaptability of the reflector, the intensity of lighting can again and again be comfortably varied, thereby creating different lighting effects in the room. This pendant luminaire successfully embodies an interesting symbiosis of form and function – with its design that consistently complements its functionality, it creates a new aesthetics.