RISD Furniture Design Students Seek Inspiration for Final Lighting Design Projects

It’s early in the spring semester, and students in a lighting design course offered through the Furniture Design department are just beginning to consider ideas for their final projects. Junior Ankita Bhat 26 FD is thinking about sacred geometry and researching historical betty oil lamps. Senior Jack Kemper 25 FD is building on concepts he has been exploring for his thesis: plastics, oil and industrial manufacturing practices. Grad student Mary Alford MFA 26 FD (above) says she’s leaning into the playful side of her design practice and getting inspired by specific materials like latex and aluminum mesh.

“This is the time to think, experiment and mull things over,” faculty member Jonah Takagi 02 FD tells the class. “Keep sketching and exploring.”

This phase of the making process—ideation—can be tough for designers. Some are inspired by the natural world, others by the work of great artists and designers who came before them. Some makers come up with dozens of ideas they need to sift through in order to create something cohesive and true to their overall vision. Others find themselves staring at the proverbial blank canvas waiting for inspiration to hit.

One of Takagi’s goals in teaching the course is to “demonstrate fluency with the design process as a comprehensive arc, from research and ideation through development, prototyping and implementation/testing.” He organized a class field trip to New York City, which helped get the wheels turning for many of the students.  

They began by poring over contemporary lighting fixtures on view in the huge Roll & Hill showroom off Manhattan’s Canal Street before heading to NoHo to check out the wide array of designs offered by RISD alum Lindsey Adelman 96 ID and her crew. They went on to study authentic historical lighting designs at the Merchant’s House Museum—where the furniture, decor, clothing, photographs and books of the mid-19th-century Tredwell family have been preserved—and visited a skyspace (one of 85 scattered across the country) by American artist and “master of light” James Turrell, which Takagi describes as “a quasi-religious experience.”

Bhat was inspired by a piece she encountered in the Lindsey Adelman showroom in addition to a tiny clay lamp she picked up in her home country of Singapore during spring break. Fellow junior Mandy Zhang 26 FD also found inspiration on the road, in her case the ornate cast-metal streetlamps that abound in Florence, Italy. “I’m hoping to replicate some of those details in the silhouette of my final project,” she says, “and thinking about how I might mix metal with wooden veneers.”

Takagi encourages the students to tap into ideas discussed by visiting creatives Jamie Wolfond 13 FD and Rachel Griffin as well as design elements that featured into earlier, smaller-scale assignments. One such assignment required students to experiment with the flow of light from a single source to create either graphic or narrative content. Another encouraged them to play with color and texture to create different atmospheres or experiences.

“Light transcends boundaries of materiality and form,” Takagi says. “It defines and engenders space and colors, sharpens, softens, highlights and shades our experience of the world around us.”

Top photo: Grad student Mary Alford envisions a bobby pin lighting fixture wired with LED rope lighting. Photo by Kaylee Pugliese

Simone Solondz
April 10, 2025