Though we’re always careful here at 3rings to avoid giving undue attention to “small” products or accessories, every so often we come across a piece that just refuses to be ignored. Have a look at the delight that is Zietta Clara’s Knobs and Pulls, or the inspired functionality of Keep It Cartesian‘s electric faceplates, to see what I mean. In that spirit, then, I just can’t pass up German Designer Daniel Becker’s Melting Light.

Melting Light. Designed by Daniel Becker.

A hanging lamp, it shares a common thread with such disparate but alike sensibilities of Ross Lovegrove (Liquid Space) and Pieke Bergmans (Crystal Virus). The impetus behind Melting Light was the search for the ever elusive “ideal form” – as all good art/design aspires to do. In this case, though, it was “ideal” with a twist: Becker aimed for a shape that would assist in the diffusion of a light source originating from beneath the shade, rather than within or above it.

Discovering that “the wave form turned out to be the optimal design for reflecting the light diffusely into the room,” he then created a glass bulb in the shape of a tear drop, filled it with LED elements, and attached same beneath the lampshade by means of a thin wire-very like a placenta to a fetus, or an exploratory emissary to its mother ship.

As the previous metaphors might suggest, Melting Light has an extraterrestrial aspect that lends it an intriguing aesthetic. Looking at its stark form against a background of black, I’m reminded of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the iconography of birth mingles with cosmic imagery to create the likes of which we’d never imagined. In its deft manipulation of illumination, as well as its unconventional aesthetic, Becker’s Melting Light accomplishes much the same.