A conversation with Luke Mills, Design Director at South Drawn
The Point Five wall sconce started a little differently to most of our designs. We had around 200 kilos of glass offcuts left over from other pieces, sitting with our maker, and set ourselves the challenge of turning them into something sculptural. What emerged is a reminder that constraints can often lead somewhere more interesting.
We sat down with Luke to talk about how it got there.
Where did Point Five begin?
We have a lot of glass pieces in our collection, and they’re often organic shapes. Glass comes in big square pieces, so you end up with a lot of offcuts. After a few years we had close to 200 kilos of glass offcuts with our local glass manufacturer.
Point Five came about from trying to find a way to use those offcuts, and looking for ways we could use them to create a new product line. It started with this exploration of taking small shards of glass and reforming them into these glass objects, which had this beautiful amount of character in it.
Why was glass the right material to explore?
A closed loop material, glass that isn’t coloured can be remelted without losing its physical or chemical properties. It’s beautiful that you can just take this material that could be landfill and then create such a beautiful, simple object out of it.
Were there challenges to overcome in trialling this new method?
Glass is a fluid material that always throws a few curve balls when testing new methods. We tried all sorts of forms. More aggressive forms, more structured forms, and slumping it, and casting into blocks. We ended up actually just going for this organic slumping process.
Every piece has still got an organic nature to it, because the piece is not being forced, cast or force moulded. It’s a combination of heat and gravity and time.
Where does the name come from?
I like names that have a nod to the process involved in the piece. It starts with measuring out half a kilo, or 0.5, of frit into a mould, which then gets melted down. That value of 0.5 is used for every single piece. Even if they look slightly different, each piece has got exactly the same amount of glass frit in it.
What did you want the piece itself to feel like?
I wanted to achieve an intimate feel with this piece, and for the finer details to be the focal point in the design.
All the character in the piece, the bubbles and the texture underneath, is all just a product of the process. You’ve got all these tiny pieces of glass melting down, air bubbles get caught inside, and it’s a really beautiful little detail, because you have a clear piece of glass that has this structural element to it, but then there’s another layer of depth from all the bubbles.
Were there any serendipitous moments in your material exploration?
A beautiful element of glass is that you get a really clean transmission of light. These pieces come in clear and grey and bronze, so you get a really nice, even, natural light diffusion, even though there’s a lot of character in the glass.
You talk about engineering and critical thinking sitting behind every product, and your light units are completely refined in house. What does that look like in Point Five?
We wanted the base unit to be as subtle and robust as possible. It houses a custom LED unit designed to give a 360 degree light output, and it is IP65 rated. We designed the CNC components to integrate with the production of the piece, to make that as simple as possible, and to streamline the installation process.
The design process is a mixture of CAD, 3D prototypes and installation tests. Then it is a slow process of refinement, and eliminating unnecessary parts.
We design physical products, so we have built a design culture of jumping between our workshop, which has all the manufacturing capabilities to test and trial things, and in depth CAD analysis of the products. It means using our ability to CNC parts in house and make prototypes, and understand the real world implications of what we are designing through material testing.
The fastening detail is a feature in its own right. Where did that start?
We had a bit of fun with the fastener mechanism. I wanted some sort of element of personality, a distinctive feature, or an interaction between the user and the glass piece when it was being installed. One of the ideas we explored was the tensile strength in metals, which offer that interplay through the natural tension they embody.
Why two details rather than one, and how did you land on the new button fastener?
We wanted two little personality elements to the collection. It’s always interesting how much these subtle forms will completely change the aesthetic or the DNA of the piece.
We went through lots and lots of sketches of all these different details, and I landed on the one that’s quite simple and obvious, which is the little button. And we slowly refined that profile to something soft and polished.
What is a takeaway from the Point Five wall light, and the lessons you learned along the way?
The collection is a really good example of how a really tight brief, or material limitations, can create a creative outcome. Even though it’s come from a very organic creative process, it’s ended in a really refined end product that has a few different elements of personality, driven from both design choices and the processes that we follow.
How would you sum it up?
Point Five is a genuine response to how you can reuse waste and create a valuable object.
