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Ingo Maurer’s Inflatable LED Lighting Fixtures

This is a brilliant use of materials, and a clear design improvement over its predecessor. Lighting designers Ingo Maurer and Theo Möller have designed the Blow Me Up, an inflatable lighting fixture:

I currently have standard fluorescent lighting fixtures as house lighting in my photography studio, and the Blow Me Up is such a vast improvement over those. Consider that those fluorescent fixtures are metal, making them heavy; for safety’s sake they must be hung with chains connected to eye bolts mounted in the ceiling crossbeams, which limits their placement. On top of that the glass fluorescent bulbs are fragile, and anytime the large lighting boom is used in the studio, great care must be taken so as not to strike the fixture and potentially shatter a bulb.

These inflatable lights could be hung anywhere in the studio using string and screws with anchors. If the boom strikes them, there’s no danger of falling glass shards. And they are of course easier to ship and transport than fluorescent bulbs.

The downside is that the lights are a bit pricey, ringing in at €240 (USD $284) for a single 180cm (about 6’) fixture.