A Fresh Perspective on Production from Tom Dixon

By calling his 2010 collection “Industry”, Tom Dixon firmly grounded his show at Zona Tortona’s Superstudio Piu in contemporary, design-led production. He clearly had fun creating the Flash Factory where digitally-manufactured limited editions - a stainless steel light and a brass candle-holder - were instantly produced on-site. Design shoppers personally assembled the products on-site or bought them flat-packed or fully-assembled. This graphic demonstration of production-on-demand shows where Tom Dixon believes the future lies (as explained in his self-published book, “Industry”) with designers acting as manufacturers and products made in super-fast time-lines.

He also launched his Flat Lamp light bulb collection - a collaboration with Philips Electronics that integrates OLED technology (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) within highly-compressed, single glass sheets. Dixon is among the first to utilise this new, energy-efficient, light source which he presented in super-thin designs (floor, wall and table lights plus ceiling pendants) that merged functionality with attractive aesthetics.

Sustainability continued thematically in the Offcut Bench, a flat-pack design made from furniture manufacturing waste. Also new were Void, a curvaceous, heat-proof, spun-metal light and Peg, a no-nonsense, stackable, wooden cafe chair while Jack (Dixon’s iconic, polyethylene stacking light) re-emerged in new colours - black, white and fluoro orange.