Rainlight scoops top Red Dot award with AMBITUS

Yorgo Lykouria, Founder and Creative Director of Rainlight, collaborated with Zumtobel, one of the world’s leading lighting manufacturers, over a 10-year period to create AMBITUS, which is distinctive because of its compact profile and circular shape to emit maximum light distribution, in a sector dominated by linear forms.

‘It seemed to me a paradox to design a luminaire with straight lines when all natural sources of light such as the sun and moon are spherical,’ Yorgo explains. ‘Linear lighting systems often express disruption in a building that has complex geometry, rather than order. AMBITUS resolves this challenge because a circle is derived from a point; it can change direction and follows a modulated form without being oriented incorrectly.’

This luminaire’s ring shape means it has light distribution of almost 360 degrees, supplying maximum efficiency and quality of light. For instance, a two-person office would normally require two linear lighting solutions but one ring luminaire is all it takes to ensure sufficiently high quality light at the workstations.

The design development stage involved using pliable LEDs and a highly complex tooling process, while AMBITUS’ perforated pattern is achieved using sophisticated computational formulas, with the resulting abstract design reminiscent of being beneath a starlit sky. It is suspended by distinctive, thin cables that also carry power and data, with the result being a precise, elegant product that fuses design poetry with sharp functionality.

The AMBITUS light engine offers tuneable white, direct and indirect lighting, with the ability to adjust colour temperature via programming systems or directly via a smart phone. It has been well documented that light works not only visually but also emotionally and biologically and AMBITUS’ adjustability can achieve harmony with users’ circadian rhythms, providing energising or calming light as required.

AMBITUS’s balanced synergy of design and technical sophistication impressed the judges of the Red Dot Awards. AMBITUS clinched the ‘Best of the Best’ product award – the highest accolade in the awards programme, with Zumtobel also picking up two other Red Dot awards, one for a flexible spotlight and another for a collaboration with Austrian design studio, EOOS.

‘Receiving the Best of the Best award really is a great honour,’ Yorgo adds. ‘This project dates back over a decade and I knew then that there was a need for a high-performance circular light and this is the perfect recognition of that now.’