Since the start of 2025 students from UWTSD (University of Wales Trinity St David, Swansea Art College) from the BA Design Crafts and BA Surface Pattern courses have been set a live brief and generated work to be used an a celebratory event at Material Matters as part of The London Design Festival in September 2025.
This was a design and make project that explored the values and vision of Anglepoise. A project that sensitively addressed both the designer’s and user’s interaction with materials and processes in the manufacture and use of functional products. It required students to think of Anglepoise lamps as tools that support all manner of activities. Anglepoise lamps for ‘doers’- writers, makers, engineers, coders, cooks… People that require light to accomplish their work. The challenge of this project was to enhance the experience of using a task lamp and broaden the appeal of an Anglepoise product whilst remaining true to the company’s values and visions. It is a project that necessitates an understanding and demands of the task at hand whilst being sensitive to how a user physically (and emotionally) engages with a product. Anglepoise supplied a lampshade template for all students to use which was then screwed into an internal lamp holder forming part of an existing lighting collection called the Type 80. Designed by legendary Industrial Designer Sir Kenneth Grange.
Encouraging radical, unique interpretations that play with the themes of materials, light and surface treatment. Anglepoise has long had sustainability, repair and longevity at the heart of everything they do. So, consideration had to be taken across the entire lifecycle of the product.
Quotes from students:
Claire Tompkinson BA Design Crafts: Glass, Ceramics & Jewellery
“The overall theme of my lamp is impermanence and quiet transformation. It’s about working with nature as a collaborator— allowing living materials like roots to shape the piece slowly over time. It reflects how beauty can emerge through decay and fragility”
Anna Jones, BA Design Crafts: Glass, Ceramics & Jewellery (Lampshade Materials – Acrylic Wool and Porcelain)
“Ceramics can be more than just simple clay forms. While creating these lamps, I realised that clay and other materials that are typically considered incompatible can result in fascinating textures and shapes. This understanding goes beyond the materials themselves; it involves exploring what happens when experimenting with different materials and discovering the outcomes. Throughout this project I have developed an understanding of ceramics and bending the rules with the materials. As a design craft student this has been an exciting experience.”
Claire Tilling, BA Design Crafts: Glass, Ceramics & Jewellery
(Lampshade Materials – beach found plastic objects, recycled copper, hand-painted sea glass, vintage Anglepoise lamp cord)
“Designing for Anglepoise allowed me to go beyond standard lighting materials, using found objects to repurpose I developed discarded items into a luxury product. Using these materials allows for a unique, environmentally low-impact design that tells a unique and personal story. Working with an iconic brand and pushing the boundaries has resulted in an innovative piece that partly transforms into wearable jewellery. So you can have your desk lamp on and wear it at the same time!”
Quotes:
“It is vital for creative institutions to involve industry in anyway they can to enable collaboration and exploration which in term helps build confidence and contacts for these talented young creatives. What has been very special about this project is that it involved two different coastal cities each with strong heritage legacy’s that can compete in any global setting. Attitude is everything here.”
Claire Sambrook, Project Lead and Senior Lecturer at The University of Portsmouth
“From the moment I heard there was a possibility of working on a live brief with Anglepoise I was all in! An absolute fan of the iconic lamp design, I knew our students could step up and take on the challenge to respond to the ‘Beyond’ brief. On Design crafts we specialise in three core areas (glass, ceramics and jewellery) and are passionate about all manner of materials in-between. Students on Design Crafts are naturally curious about materials and as makers we are natural problem solvers. The Design Crafts team (both tutors and technicians) pulled together to support our students’ individual visions in a broad spectrum of materials and process from waterjet cut metal, welding, enamel, patination, kiln formed glass, patte de verre, electroforming, lampworking, ceramic casting and mould making. In addition, you will find eco materials such as grass roots and pine cones and other recycled objects such as beach waste and electrical components from the lamps themselves. What an exciting journey we have all been on! Working with the Anglepoise team was invaluable for our students and the individual feedback and studio visits were both insightful and fun. Thank you to all for your support, it has been a real pleasure to see our second-year blossom and quite literally go ‘beyond’ their comfort zones and also their making ability and professionalism. We cannot wait to see the exhibition and celebrate the lamps at London Design Festival!”
Anna Lewis – Programme Manager BA Design Crafts: Glass, Ceramics & Jewellery, Swansea College of Art – UWTSD
“Students were allowed the freedom and opportunity to experiment and dictate their choices withinthis live brief; to really consider their options and how ‘textiles’ in its broadest sense could behaveas a light shade. To reimagine the iconic Type 80 design in its exacting profile with a totally different fibre; is no mean feat! Students from surface pattern and textiles created various lamps out of repurposed, waste or dead stock cloth as well as paper and more translucent softer fibres too, such as shear cottons and silks. Layering these different weights of substrate created strength but also created depth harnessing the translucency of the design considering the light being switched on or off – this was an integral aspect to the brief that was proposed by Anglepoise”
Staff Quote Claire Savage – Lecturer, BA Hons & MDes Surface Pattern & Textiles, UWTSD
Come and see the project and other exciting presentations at Material Matters.
Photography by Claire Sambrook
