Lighting Up Lives

LIGHTING UP LIVES

The first Bottlehouse outside our London studio at Clerkenwell Design Week 2019

Every minute a million plastic bottles are bought around the world and the number is set to top half a trillion by 2021, far outstripping our current recycling efforts. This statistic inspired Ricky Sandhu of Six Miles Across London Ltd (aka small.) to take action and create BottleHouse®. His vision is to create a new circular economy by building temporary off-grid shelters from used plastic bottles and deploying them in refugee camps and other areas of world human displacement. Ricky called on our lighting team to help with the lighting solution and I volunteered immediately, welcoming the opportunity to give something back. This collaboration resulted in the erection of the first BottleHouse outside our London studio as part of Clerkenwell Design Week. Plastic milk bottles were used as diffusers to create standard and feature pendants for the solar powered LED lamps. My experience led me to think further about plastic and waste in the lighting industry, the ramifications of our design decisions, and the responsibility that all of us living in the first world have to seize opportunities to help those born into less fortunate circumstances. We must not underestimate the importance of light in the developing world. Access to artificial light means longer days, creating more time to study and read. This is not restricted only to the hours of darkness, but can also help when the weather is overcast or interior lighting conditions experience little daylight. In this way off-grid technology can dramatically improve literacy and education. The use of LED also removes the widespread and hazardous use of kerosene lamps. This inspired me to present BottleHouse and the global issues it highlights at London Design Fair. As fate would have it, the live broadcast took place on Friday 20 September 2019, the first day of the Global Climate Strike Week. Ricky made contact again in October to ask me to design and build the lighting for his new Milk-BottleHouse featuring at Grand Designs Live at NEC Birmingham. In only four days I constructed a 1.2m x 1.2m triangular pyramid pendant and installed all recycled spotlights. The tetrahedron shape of the pendant was a homage to the original BottleHouse. small. continue to work on improvements to the design and test other versions. We hope that BottleHouse will see real world use eventually, but for me, most importantly, it represents a beacon of positive change to raise awareness, to encourage the growth of the circular economy; an inspiring shift in how we need to change our thinking. It is a seed to be nurtured by all, planted to encourage ideas about how we can, quite literally, light up lives.