Name: Ask a designer - How to save the day | Lighting design
Uploaded: 2025-05-29T12:19:34.000Z
Duration: 3 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is Daniel Rybakken in his studio in Gothenburg.

For the past few years, the 30-year-old has been winning one international award after another for his lamp designs.

His work is shown in Milan, London and Paris.

Unlike a lot of other designers, he focuses not so much on the lamp, but on the light.

The big problem is that they're not actually about light.

Most lamps are... the press photos are taken with the light turned off.

So it's just much more about the sculptural part of it than actually designing light.

He loves exploring how light behaves in nature and how that can be recreated.

He can even make a windowless space look sunny, like this stairwell in Stockholm.

He worked on the installation for two years and used 6,500 LEDs.

What you see here, these light patches, it's actually not the sun coming in.

It's actually LEDs behind the wall to make the illusion as natural as possible and as real as possible.

It's important, all these details, like this edge here on the sides, have to be a little bit sharper than the top and bottom.

So it's a lot of testing to get this right.

He was heavily influenced by the light in Scandinavia, where it's sunny almost around the clock in the summer and there's very little daylight in winter.

I think a lot of people are very sensitive to light and I think that's natural when you see how the weather is and how, you know, it's three o'clock and it's already starting to, you know, have the sun set already.

And I think that the lack of light makes you really focus on the positive things with it.

He's been fascinated by this effect since his childhood.

His bedroom at his parents' home in Oslo was his first research lab, so to speak.

When this small little room is lit with natural light, you just feel like you're part of something greater than the four walls of the room.

You know, then you turn on the light, the room is transformed into almost like a prison.

Rybakken's natural light installations can only be seen in galleries or at design trade fairs.

His lamps are now being mass-produced and sell for between 400 and 800 euros.

It sometimes takes several years for Rybakken to go from hatching an idea to completing a lamp.

He uses computer programs and a 3D printer to develop prototypes.

Despite their technical sophistication, the forms of his designs are always clear and simple.

I just do the things that I would want for myself.

And I think in that way I can create things that are very honest, instead of me trying to figure out what you would like.

By four in the afternoon, Rybakken no longer has any daylight for working, so he heads home to his little daughter.