LED Dandelion Lights Will Literally Blow You Away!

An Amsterdam-based studio has combined advanced, eco-friendly LED lighting technology with elements from the natural world to create an incredible synergistic installation that will literally blow you away!

A Fragile Future?

Studio Drift, the company behind the installation entitled Fragile Future, is in itself a synergy of cultures.

Founded in 2007 by Lonneke Gordijn from the Netherlands, and Swindon-born Ralph Nauta, Studio Drift’s work has been acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, as well as being nominated for and winning a great many prestigious design awards.

These include the very first 'Artprize’ in 2006, 'Light of the Future' from the German Design Council in 2008, the Moet Hennessy – Pavilion of Art and Design London Prize in 2010, 1st Prize in the Dutch ‘ZomerExpo’ in 2011, and  the ‘Finest Light Sculpture’ Award at the Interieur, Kortrijk in 2012.

Fragile Future was created by harvesting thousands of Dandelions (from the French ‘dent-de-lion’ or ‘lion’s tooth’), and allowing them to dry for a time, before painstakingly gluing the individual seeds to tiny LED lights.

These in turn were fastened to a bronze, three-dimensional frame incorporating electrical circuits.  The effect is breathtaking, and serves to provide a clear, unambiguous statement against mass-production and the profligacy of our throwaway culture. Check out this beautiful video all about the installation:

Thus, this installation poses the questions: Are the technological developments of our age truly more advanced than the evolution of nature, of which the dandelion is such an ephemeral symbol? And could they be encouraged to evolve together, without one displacing or destroying the other?

Nauta explains, “Scientists look at the processes in nature and take this, mimic this, and create a new technology from this so, in a way, technology is an evolution from nature.”

Obviously, the decision to utilise energy-efficient LED lights was no accident, as the technology is both up-to-the-minute and practical for this purpose. The hi-tech design of the LEDs, when juxtaposed with the dandelion seeds, creates a unique counterpoint and provides a symbiotic tension between the two diverse elements – one man-made, the other completely natural.

Better For The Environment

LED lights generate little or no heat in comparison to traditional bulbs, which made them ideal for this installation. It would have been almost impossible to glue tiny, fragile dandelion seeds to a scaldingly hot incandescent or fluorescent bulb, after all.

This also speaks to the energy-efficiency of LEDs over traditional bulbs, which lose up to 90% of their power as heat. Thus, an LED will require as little as 1/10^th of the electricity to power it as an incandescent bulb producing the same lumens of brilliance. This in turn equates to a drastic reduction in energy costs, and a profound decrease in carbon emissions.

This in turn equates to a drastic reduction in energy costs, and a profound decrease in carbon emissions, making LEDs much more environmentally-friendly than their traditional counterparts.

The incredible 50,000 hour expected life-span and eminent recyclability of the LED bulb could also be seen as a direct contradiction to the transience of the dandelion seeds. However, if viewed in another way, the seeds form a part of the never-ending cycle of nature, bestowing an enduring, permanent quality on them as well.

So, whether you love it or loathe it, it cannot be denied that Fragile Future represents a critical yet utopian vision of the future of Earth, in which two very different evolutionary paths have collided and agreed not to harm each other.

By switching from wasteful, throwaway lights to LEDs, you can help this ideal become a reality, thereby replacing the word fragile with enduring.