LED technology is enabling energy-efficient lighting to spread into households the world over—but it is also sparking innovative design. Not long ago, we covered Sanyo’s Eneloop Lamp, a table lamp that converts into a flashlight—so you always have light available during an emergency. There is a similar concept behind Korean designer Doosan Baek’s Drop Lights, a system of LED indoor lighting that works on a ceiling-mounted charger.

Drop Light. Designed by Doosan Baek.

Four lights in the shape of water drops hang from a flower-shaped track. Each one is removable; you can use them as table lamps throughout your room or home, sprinkling the apartment with lollipop-shaped posts of light. Baek has produced many lamps in one lamp—not exactly the lighting equivalent of nesting tables but somewhere in that neighborhood. That, in itself, is also efficient: we could even say that the Drop Lights are killing five birds with one stone (four individual table lamps, one ceiling light). The piece depends on its pieces, which is a timely phenomenon, since everything is coming up modular lately—one of the decided benefits of LEDs. Like the psychedelic Bloxels, the Drop Lights make illumination magical again. Perhaps this penchant for playfulness harkens back to the wonder early man must have had for the sun. Perhaps not. But lighting tends to be one of A+D’s most daring arenas, seemingly on the forefront in terms of artistic and technological invention.

Drop Lights presents a great example of what creativity can bring to the relatively new LED. And while the entire light fixture creates a beautiful silhouette, the individual drops of light, once removed, echo the classic form of Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s famous Bauhaus lamp.