The Electric Ribbon Trick
Emeco has transformed a rundown 1940s workshop into a home away from home (image: Ramak Fazel).
In 2018, Pere Llonch sent an email to the industrial designer Stefan Diez. Llonch, CEO of the Catalan lighting company Vibia, already knew Diez. Only a year previously, the pair had launched Guise, a lighting collection designed to make borosilicate glass tubes emit an ambient glow without any visible light source. So this wasn’t an email out of the blue. But even by the standards of two people who knew one another, Llonch’s email was kind of weird.
“Dear Stefan,” it began, “As you know I’m very interested to find a concept based in connecting positive and negative… How do you feel about it? Do you have something in mind…?” And that was more or less it. An abstract question, paired with an open invitation to design something – anything – in response. Llonch’s only requirement, it would seem, was that this thing should somehow connect positive and negative. Whatever that might mean.
Initially, the email appears to have been met with a degree of confusion at Diez’s studio in Munich; in fact, an earlier discussion between the two that had circled around a similar topic had failed to lead to any concrete ideas. “I thought it was a really strange briefing,” Diez acknowledges. “I remember that Pere was calling this thing Plusminus and talking about connectivity, and I was hearing him, understanding what he was saying, but it didn’t really ring a bell immediately. I wasn’t electrified.”
“The way I see my job is close to being a magician. I always want that magic dimension within my work.”
Nevertheless, Llonch must have been onto something, because after Diez had parsed the unorthodoxy of the briefing, the invitation began to get under his skin. “Something about the way Pere formulated his question in that email made it click,” he says. “I started to assume that this was not really a question about positive and negative, but rather a question about taking a radical look into the world of lighting and being a designer – thinking about things that people just don’t question any more.”
This is the kind of thing that lighting designers often say, particularly with the rise of microLEDs and OLEDs – technologies that allow for lighting to exist as flat or flexible panels in contrast to the forms proscribed by traditional filament bulbs and conventional LED lamps. “It’s a total paradigm shift,” summarised Carlotta de Bevilacqua, CEO of the Italian lighting brand Artemide, when asked about the impact of OLEDs back in 2013.[1] “But I’ve always been a critic of technologies such as OLED,” says Diez, “because although I understand that they make a surface into a light, what quality do we get from that? It clearly has some good applications, such as in work environments, but it’s really only bringing efficiency, whereas I’m more interested in effectiveness.”
In response to Llonch’s email, Diez wanted to explore something different to the technological breakthroughs that typically inflame lighting designers. “Like, how you actually get electricity to a light,” he explains. The challenge, as Diez saw it, was to understand how you could power a lamp if you stripped away conventional cabling. What other ways are there of getting current to flow between positive and negative?
***
“The way I see my job is close to being a magician,” explains Diez, grinning from beneath a black baseball cap. “I always want that magic dimension within my work.” This is a comparison that Diez is fond of, having regularly used it as a metaphor for his working process since founding his studio, Diez Office, in 2002. “You’ve probably heard me say this a few times,” he admits.
Previous projects from Diez’s studio have been called things such as the Houdini chair, Rope Trick lamp, and This That Other seating series (named for a card trick that you have almost certainly seen, even if you don’t recognise the name) – magicky things all round, in other words, because Diez understands the process by which a magician works as offering a good model for design. The final outcome should always look effortless and delightful, even when a considerable amount of engineering and thought has gone on behind the scenes to make the trick come together. “It’s about creating a fascination by making things disappear, for instance,” Diez notes, “or making the impossible easy, or creating a simple solution for something that appears complicated. I don’t like it when things look like too much effort.”
In that respect, the aforementioned Guise is a classic Diez trick. You hide a strip of LEDs within a thin aluminium element. That aluminium is designed to be unobtrusive and discreet – it might as well be up your sleeve – meaning that it can be surreptitiously attached to a tube of borosilicate glass that features some simple geometric scoring across its surface. So far, nothing magical. But when you run power through the lamp, those score marks suddenly start to glow, and the cut edges of the glass begin shimmering, as if the light is leaking out from where the tube has been slit open. There’s still no real clue as to where that light is coming from, though. The LEDs aren’t visibly shining through the tube, so it’s kind of a mystery.
The truth, as with all good illusions, is simple. “I like a cheap trick,” Diez explains. “I don’t enjoy it when things become too complicated. Give me a hat trick instead.” Guise, for instance, relies upon the principle of total internal reflection – a basic physical phenomenon that you learn about in school. If light strikes the barrier of a material at a sufficiently wide angle, it doesn’t refract outwards, but rather bounces back inside. In Diez’s lamp, the angle of the LEDs ensures that the light they emit is kept inside the glass, bouncing invisibly around its internal structure. It can only escape the material when it comes to a cut edge, or else to those patterns scored into the surface of the borosilicate. Abracadabra, Refracto Begone! And there you have it: light without a light source. Or so things appear, anyway.
“The condition for such a crazy briefing is trust. Usually companies want control over the process, but Pere didn’t because he trusted me.”
Given this interest in magic, you can imagine why Diez’s curiosity was piqued by the openness of Llonch’s email. “The condition for such a crazy briefing is trust,” he explains. “Usually companies want control over the process, but Pere didn’t because he trusted me. And that trust needs to come from both sides, because a weird briefing is a big risk for a designer. You need to be sure the idea isn’t completely stupid if you’re going to invest time and money into it.” So Diez started experimenting. Working with his colleague Arthur Desmet, he began messing around in the studio’s converted joinery space on Munich’s Geyerstraße, exploring the potential of different materials in the hope that they would have something to show Llonch when he next visited. “Let me know about your thoughts,” Llonch had written to conclude his initial email, “just in order to know if we need to allocate time and resources for some new concept for next Milan fair…” – a fair due to take place in April 2019. “So we’re talking about less than half a year for a totally new concept,” explains Diez. “Which is a lot of pressure.”
Today, nearly four years on from that initial email, Llonch is in a reflective mood. His colleagues have just led a tour of the brand’s factory in Gavà, outside of Barcelona, where production has been completely overhauled to accommodate the manufacture of Plusminus, Diez’s new lighting product. “To be honest, and I think this will be very evident,” Llonch muses, “I had no idea about the consequences of that email.”
***
The essential structure of any magic trick, assuming that you trust the authority of Christopher Nolan’s 2006 stage-magician thriller The Prestige, comes in three parts. The first of these is the Pledge. “The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man,” narrates Cutter, an ingénieur played by Michael Caine. “He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn’t.” Well duh.
After Llonch’s email, Diez and Desmet began exploring what new approaches towards powering lighting they could devise. Fairly early on, they settled on a basic methodology. “We tried to electrify things that are not usually electrified,” Diez summarises. Photographs from this development phase show wires hooked to wooden clothes pegs, which are in turn pinched onto scrunched plasticky forms; or complex branching mobiles made from tangles of quasi-coat hangars; or elaborate constellations of a metallic sheet material, folded into three-dimensional patterns that glow electric and beautiful, like shards of a mirror caught in the sun. “Which were all somehow fascinating,” Diez notes, “but so complicated – they weren’t fitting our major goal as designers, which is to simplify things.” “We were having fun, but it was also tough because the research was going in every direction,” adds Desmet. “It was almost a non-brief, so the results were very complicated.” If things are too complex, you don’t have much of a Pledge.
Faced with material research that was going nowhere fast, Diez and Desmet hit upon a new idea. The pair fished a red ribbon from a drawer in the studio and suspended it in their space. This ribbon was their new Pledge. The next part of the trick, the Turn (in which “the magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary”) seemed obvious. “It was literally the day before the presentation to Pere,” recalls Diez, “when we both suddenly thought, ‘Why not electrify a ribbon?’ We take for granted that electricity is conducted through wires, but what if there was something else that could do the same?” When Llonch arrived in the studio, the pitch delivered to him was nearly as abstract as his initial email. “We thought we’d just show him what we’d tried and see if he was interested,” says Desmet. “We put a piece of foil or something on the ribbon,” adds Diez, “and said, ‘This is a lamp.’”
“I like a cheap trick. I don’t enjoy it when things become too complicated. Give me a hat trick instead.”
The system proposed to Llonch broke with many of the cardinal principles of lighting design. In place of the usual assortment of conductive wires concealed within walls, Diez and Desmet wanted to create lighting that carried the flow of electricity through the room itself, conducting it along textile ribbons pulled taut into strict geometric arrangements, or else dropped into swirling loops whose arcs would be prescribed by basic physics. “I like using gravity as a force, with material as a counter-force,” Diez explains. “The dialogue between the two usually gives you nice shapes and I believe there’s a link between that logic and beauty: you don’t have to force something. You can just let it go.” With these ribbons drawing a current through the space, and the specific form of the installation determined by gravity, the studio reasoned that lamps could simply be clipped onto the textile wherever light might be needed. “I saw that it was about getting the freedom to conduct light in a space,” Llonch recalls, “which is really powerful.”
One implication of Diez’s proposal was to erode the distinction between architectural and decorative lighting: the difference between functional lighting fully integrated into a space and light sources selected for their physical aesthetic. “Architectural lighting serves a purpose, but not any decoration or mood,” says Diez. “It’s very often anti-poetic. I think we can blur these boundaries to open up a new potential. I have never understood why spaces like offices have to be so strictly utilitarian in their design.” In place of more static lighting arrangements, whose form is partially determined by the architecture of a space and access to its wiring, the studio reasoned that Plusminus could be a means of making lighting malleable and tactile, safe to hold in your hands, and capable of being rearranged to suit changing needs. “It was about the emancipation of light from architecture,” Diez says, “because until now we’ve been using electrical interfaces that reach back to the pre-war era.” By contrast, once a ribbon had been connected to the grid at one end, or plugged into a wall socket, it could trace its way around a room in as direct or as meandering a route as you pleased. “I think we’ve reached a point where the traditional grid system doesn’t really make sense anymore and we should be able to control a bigger part of lighting,” Diez notes. “This idea that you have to think about the architectural components of lighting is over.”
The difficulty, of course, was the third part of the trick. “[Making] something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back,” explains Cutter. “That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call the Prestige.” Electrifying a ribbon, Diez reasoned, wasn’t difficult – a simple matter of stitching in conductive threads – but electrifying it in the right way seemed impossible. “We could have just used a sewing machine,” Diez explained, “but then you have these parallel bumps where the wires are concealed. And if it ever became knotted or twisted, you’d get a short circuit at the connection point.” If Plusminus were to work effectively, it had to meet certain functional requirements. The ribbon had to betray no sign that it was anything other than a conventional textile; users needed to be able to clip or unclip as many lights to it as they wanted, at any point upon its length; and, when the trick was finished, the ribbon should revert to normal, with no sign as to its hidden conductivity and no marks left behind to reveal where electrical contact had been made. There had to be a Prestige.
“We couldn’t have anything that would indicate this was a trick, and not just a standard ribbon,” says Diez. “But I was worried whether that was actually possible, because it was the part that I had least control over. I had no idea how I was going to get electricity inside that ribbon.”
Fortunately, somebody else did.
***
At Vibia’s base in Gavà, textile designer Karina Wirth points to a terracotta ribbon, draped from the ceiling and swung into low, lazy loops. Clipped to each coil is a glass sphere, fat and plump like grapes on the vine. Each sphere glows soft and honey sweet, while the end of the ribbon spools loosely across the floor. Nearby, a blue ribbon, lightly textured with two shades of thread, cuts sharp across the room, pendants clipped to its taut surface. There are undulating sage and grey ribbons too, variously bearing cone lamps and spotlights, before stretching out into geometric forms with strip lighting. Each ribbon is about as thick as a waist belt and they’re entirely safe to touch: you can gather the loose curves into your arms, or twang the ribbon where it has been drawn tight, the lamps shivering with the movement, but otherwise unperturbed. For their installation, the textiles have been clipped onto the walls and ceilings with small anchoring loops, or else dangled from invisible wires, or allowed to wind themselves languorously around metal rods like boas. “I got super emotional seeing it for the first time,” Wirth says. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
Wirth is usually based at the Textile Prototyping Lab (TPL) in Berlin, a research body founded by five partner institutions working across Germany’s textile and electronics industry. “We’re there to make a bridge between research, design and industry,” she says, with the group receiving funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research to connect different skillsets from across these fields. The TPL has a central prototyping facility on Berlin’s Bühringstraße for interdisciplinary research and development, with specific expertise drawn from its various partner institutions. The Saxon Textile Research Institute and Textile Research Institute Thuringia-Vogtland contribute knowledge around textile production and construction, while the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration provides support around integrating electronics within textile structures. “We have different expertises,” Wirth explains. “So we can start with prototypes in our central lab and then translate those quite quickly to other institutes to implement their knowledge on weaving on industrial machines.”
“We needed to understand how we could combine the yarns and get the electricity inside. It needed to feel like just another textile.”
Aware of the TPL and its work, Diez had travelled to Berlin in summer 2018 to seek its help in developing the Plusminus concept. “We explained the problem to Karina – that we needed to get electricity inside the ribbon and that you should be able to touch it without getting a shock – and we started working together,” he explains. “But as a textile designer, Karina wanted to achieve more. She immediately saw the potential in terms of aesthetics: pattern and glossiness.”
To push these elements of the project, Wirth began her investigations using hand weaving, exploring different conductive yarns and construction methods. “We needed to understand how we could combine the yarns and get the electricity inside,” she says. “But I also showed them the potential of the textiles and how we could get a nice construction: something that was a bit more ‘design’, because the idea needed it to have that haptic [quality] and feel like just another textile in the room. The initial prototypes Stefan had brought to us were more like something you would get in the construction industry – very technical.”
Working with a copper yarn to provide connectivity (“It behaves more or less like a normal yarn, but not as soft”), Wirth built up different weaving patterns, layering yarns such that the conductive threads would be undetectable within the final textile. “We realised it would be nicest if you could get a very even surface,” notes Wirth, “so we went deep into the construction to see how you could balance it out to make sure you wouldn’t notice it from the outside.” When the finished textile is cut open, two channels of copper are visible in its centre like veins, entirely surrounded by woven polyester threads that disguise and safely insulate the conductive core – a sleight of hand undetectable to those not in on the trick. “It’s so great when you have an expert,” Diez grins. “Karina paved the way for this. From the beginning she was clear that we could do it.”
But while Diez was working with Wirth on the development of the textile, he was also designing other elements of the system. His studio created a series of lamps to accompany the ribbon – which by now was being described as a belt – all of which were grounded in simple geometric forms: a range of variations upon spheres, cones and strip lighting. “In the beginning we had a lot of different ideas, but we ultimately felt it was wrong to overdo it, “ says Diez. “A glowing ball is nothing new – we’ve seen it a thousand times – but I still thought it was the right decision to work with primary shapes. When one does something fundamentally new, it’s such a luxury that you can work with very simple details.” This process, Desmet explains, proved equally rewarding for those working with Diez in the studio. “It’s much more fun to design a system than a single object,” he explains. “Of course you treat each element as a single object, but you’re also after a simple, common line in between everything.”
Yet even if the lamps’ forms were simple, they still posed a number of technical challenges, not least understanding how the connection to the belt could be made. Each belt can run for 30m on a single electricity source, “so you needed to have the opportunity to fix the components in any position [along that length],” explains Miquel Huertas Ferran, Vibia’s technical director. If Plusminus were to deliver the flexibility it promised, and not require each luminaire to be painstakingly threaded on from one end, the team needed to devise a click-and-connect mechanism that could clip onto any point on the belt, any number of times. “The solution had to be open,” Huertas Ferran concludes.
At the root of the connection Diez and Huertas Ferran developed to meet these requirements is a set of pins. Each lamp is fitted with a buckle, which the belt slides into before two plastic elements slip over the top and sides to hold it in place. Once the belt is anchored, a clip fitted to one of those two elements flicks down, firmly securing the lamp in place while simultaneously pushing hidden metal pins up into the centre of the textile. “Everything is based on those pins,” summarises Huertas Ferran – when they sink into the belt, they make contact with the concealed copper thread, drawing power down into the lamp. “A little bite like a vampire,” quips Diez, “and you have electricity.” Yet the art of Diez’s system is in disguising its operation. A precedent for Plusminus, Diez explains, was a style of festoon lighting typically employed within Bavaria’s beer gardens, in which lights can be similarly pressed into a PVC cable to draw power. “It leaves two small marks, which you can hardly see when you take them out,” notes Diez. “But of course you cannot endlessly do that with the cable, because it’s a 7mm piece of plastic.” By contrast, Plusminus’s fangs sink through the textile unnoticed and leave no mark or damage upon their exit, while the construction of the belt means that it can flow more readily and flexibly than PVC, as well as pulling taut to carry more weight without tearing. “With the belt we’ve made, you could easily hang a thousand kilos,” says Diez.
“This is really like McDonald’s. Think of a Happy Meal. We need to make sure that every component is in the box.”
To complete the system, a series of different electrical connections and components were designed, along with specific anchor and termination points for the belt. “But the important thing is that you don’t have to [specifically] choose any of these,” explains Huertas Ferran. To accompany Plusminus, Vibia has developed an online platform that allows different installations of the system to be built from scratch, or else adapted from pre-existing templates. According to the physical requirements of a design developed on this platform, the system determines the accompanying elements needed to install it. In this respect, there is no off-the-shelf version of Plusminus. Instead, each configuration of the design is generated and manufactured for a particular situation, with the results subsequently shipped in custom packaging with personalised installation instructions. “We did a calculation around all the possibilities that you have with the different luminaires and found that for every element there was something like 798,000 combinations,” explains Judith Patiño Olivares, Vibia’s head of marketing. “It’s exponential.”
In support of her point, Patiño Olivares gestures towards the different manifestations of Plusminus that are available within the same platform: from simple arrangements positioned above desks, through to baroque chandeliers formed from nested loops of the same belt – each lamp individually controllable thanks to chips installed inside them. “Just imagine what that could mean for old buildings, such as libraries, where they may not want or be able to do any installation [within the architecture],” she says. “Here, it’s very easy. With one system you can create whatever you need. Really, this should be seen as a digital product because the website is directly connected to the factory, so everything is automatic.”
Yet for a digital product, Plusminus’s appeal is grounded in its material qualities. In Gavà, Wirth turns one of the conductive textile spools over in her hands. “You can do a great job with one part, but then it’s just a piece,” she explains, before gesturing to the finished installations scattered across the building. “But when everybody does a nice piece, all of those come together to build something.”
***
Plusminus’s implications for Vibia are considerable, not least in terms of how the company will construct the design. In the factory in Gavà, for instance, a robot called BellaBot is shuttling around the space, letting out bleeps and bloops as it passes between the work benches and stacks of electrical parts. The BellaBot’s body is a trolley ridged with shelves, topped by a digital screen displaying a cheerful cat’s face: a set of delighted anime eyes, replete with digi-whiskers and a tiny nose. A set of plastic ears completes the look. The BellaBot is manufactured by the Chinese brand Pudu Robotics, whose devices are typically used to deliver food to customers in restaurants and cafeterias, yet the Vibia BellaBot’s shelves are laden with electrical components, which it delivers around the factory. “This is really like McDonald’s,” smiles Sergi Requena, Vibia’s operations director as the BellaBot purrs past him on its way to make a delivery. “Think of a Happy Meal,” he says. “We need to make sure that every component – the hamburger, the toy, the fries – is in the box.”
The hardworking BellaBot is used throughout Vibia’s factory, but feels representative of the automation and changes to production methodology required by Diez’s new design. “Plusminus is special because the concept is so different,” explains Requena. “We’re talking about so many different combinations that it’s impossible to have all of the different versions of the product available in the final warehouse.” Maintaining sufficient stock of finished Plusminuses to meet orders would be an impossible task, but the company is still conscious of the need to manufacture and deliver its lights quickly. “You have to appreciate the differences between industries,” summarises Patiño Olivares. “If someone orders a new car, you can tell them it will be three months and that’s fine because they understand that you’re specifically building the car they’re ordering – the market is prepared to wait. But if I tell an interior designer their lighting will take three months to arrive, they’ll just go for something else instead.”
To make Plusminus’s production possible, the factory maintains a rolling stock of the system’s different components, which are automatically allocated to specific orders received through the online platform. Each order’s elements are packaged as a kit of parts, while stock is digitally monitored such that elements are replaced the moment they’re exhausted. “I compare it to a coffee shop,” says Requena. “When you go to a café, you’re maybe two minutes away from your drink because they’ve already got everything. But if the coffee shop needed to buy the sugar, the plate, and the spoon in that same two minutes, it wouldn’t be possible.” Every iteration of Plusminus, Requena explains, can be produced in two weeks. “And that’s two weeks maximum,” he says. “We’re working day by day, directly from the website.” The belt itself, he says, is manufactured off-site, before being delivered to Vibia in huge spools, where it is fitted onto a machine that can test the electrical connection throughout the textile, before cutting it to length for each installation. “The belt is like the box of the Happy Meal,” Requena jokes. “It’s the one element you always have.”
These changes to Vibia’s production have come at a considerable financial cost, with the company having significantly adapted its production to align itself with Diez’s vision. “They’ve had to invest in 150 different tools,” explains Diez, sat on the factory’s balcony having just toured the production facility as it gears up for the launch of his design. “That’s quite a pressure when you see that effect of a whole company joining forces for one idea. You have to hope that the product is strong enough to carry that.” The challenge, he notes, has not solely been to engineer the trick that lies behind Plusminus, but also to communicate the idea behind his system. “What makes a closed product easier to explain is that you say, ‘This is the problem and this is the solution,’” he says. “It fits like a key to a keyhole. But with Plusminus you don’t have one problem – you just have a feeling of where it can be applied – and it’s not one particular solution either. It’s a toolkit you can use to solve many different problems, so there’s not an immediate promise of success. You have to prove it.”
“We must have had the right prototype and vision, because if Pere had known what this process would mean, he might never have started it.”
This, however, is a trick that Diez has pulled off before. In 2012, he created New Order for the Danish design brand Hay. In its simplest terms, New Order is a set of aluminium shelving, but Diez’s design is focused around extracting as much variation as possible from within its basic framework. How many handkerchiefs can be pulled from a single sleeve? The resultant New Order system is modular and open-ended, with its aluminium elements snapping together with an Allen key, meaning that the same elements can create basic shelving units, but also clip together in different formations to form sidetables, cabinets, desks, or else elements of interior architecture. “We wanted New Order to be built like a stage,” Diez explains in a 2018 video for Hay, with the system geared up towards being endlessly recalibrated from within its basic toolkit to create any element that users may require. “New Order can be a framework for that or a backbone,” concludes Diez. In the same year as that video was published, Hay launched a second version of the system that further extended its capabilities with panels, drawers and doors, as well as workspace management solutions. “New Order [provides] a shelving system that is so flexible in its structure and composition that you can modify it, expand it and customise it in endless variations,” wrote Hay’s co-founders Rolf and Mette Hay in a company publication devoted to the design. “At first glance, the system architecture is ultra-simple, but on closer acquaintance it proves quite complex in its multi-purpose versatility.” Today, the product is one of the cornerstones of the brand’s range.
With Plusminus, Diez hopes to transfer some of the principles of New Order into the context of lighting. “I see a lot of parallels between the two,” he explains. “New Order was basically a shelf and a table, but Hay had to understand that retailing it would be very different [to other products] because it’s actually a system. That’s a difficult process, but thank God that they believed in the concept and put the time in, because today, after some 10 years, they’re really there. I now see New Order everywhere, which I had always thought could happen, but I’m still quite shocked by its success.” Both Diez and Vibia are hopeful that a similar trajectory can be followed by Plusminus. “We must have had the right prototype and the right vision back in Munich, because if Pere had known from the beginning what this process would mean, he might never have started it,” explains Diez. “You have to grow alongside it and that’s a painful process. To be honest, if Pere had seen from that first presentation that Plusminus would involve investing in 150 tools, he would have probably said he’d rather do something else instead.”
But this, of course, is how magic works – you never know what you’re in for ahead of the illusion’s completion. “And maybe that’s the reason why projects like this can stay alive,” concedes Diez. “You don’t know everything in advance, but at a certain stage you reach a point of no return – so much has been invested already that you just have to finish it.” This, Llonch concedes, is true.
“It has been,” he says, “the most expensive email I’ve ever sent.”
1 See ‘The Vanishing Point’ in Disegno #5.
Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #32. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.