The brief was to create a memento made from waste material generated at an architecture/ interior design site. Once selected, the materials themselves informed the design concept through their disparities: On the one hand, a core cut of reinforced cement concrete: structural, heavy, opaque, rough. And on the other: a sheet of multiwall polycarbonate: infill, airy, translucent and almost weightless. By designing an object of utility rather than simply a beautiful one, we embed function and upcycle waste into an object of practical purpose. Through initial sketches and models used for development, it became clear that the profile cut out for the lamp shade itself leaves behind wastage in the form of a negative offcut. By conceiving of two lamps we sought to use this too, in effectively utilising the “wastage from the wastage”. This relationship between an object and its inverse works well with the conceptual contrariness between the materials. Continuing this point/ counterpoint ideology, one lamp is an uplighter, using the polycarbonate to diffuse, while the other lights downward, picking up textures on the rough cut concrete.

design team: pravir sethi, viraj tank