Torch

The Torch range of directional fixtures was designed for Concord Lighting. The product collection was launched at the Euroluce Lighting Fair in Milan and commercial sales of 8,000 products were complete within 48 hours. Return on investment occurred in the same two day period. The product went on to win Design Awards in Germany and within two years total sales exceeded any other lighting product made in Concord’s history. By year 3 the Director of Manufacturing advised us that Torch was the most profitable product per cubic metre of manufacturing space in the companies history. Sales and marketing success allied to good design is always rewarding but equal pleasure came from the Concord factory in Newhaven. The best production staff of 300 migrated to the Torch assembly line to put the product together. The claim was that it was beautiful to touch and incredibly simple to put together leading to all sorts of shop floor production bonuses.

“Torch can be see illuminating great art collections in Europe, Russia, the Far East and Australasia and is Concord’s most successful product range to date.”

Janet Turner, Director of Marketing, Concord SLI.

Tile Group

The Tile programme of lighting was developed for Concord Lighting. A series of wafer thin flat luminaries were developed to distribute the passive low energy ambient light of compact fluorescent lamps in combination with a programme of directional display luminaires employing halogen lamps. The small scale and larger scale luminaires made it viable to walk into residential sized interiors and light the whole space without needing to fix into or onto the architecture.

Text

The Text table programme is a collection of tables and table desks made from a series of alloy profiles and connectors. First sales of the collection in the UK were to the London headquarters of Reuters followed by project sales to Unilever and the European Bank.

Retail Storage

The new retail system was developed during 2010. The design brief for the system emerges from the first principles of simplicity and sustainability. The “less is more” agenda and the recent economic crash invites even the most powerful retailers to demand higher quality at lower unit cost. The system is established as a flat pack construction using a series of industrial materials that are only 6mm thick. As a result the cost of shipping and distribution with associated emissions are reduced to a minimum, but working on a fastener to tie very thin sheet materials together proved intriguing. A high proportion of fixings and fasteners are attached within the thickness of more conventional panel materials, but our pursuit of 6mm denied us this opportunity. The fastener developed is rotated through 90 degrees to address this difference and hold the various junctions in compression. The universal fastener sits at each junction and can carry various arrays of doors, drawers, fronts, backs, branding devices, pricing strips and lighting elements. The principle product is extremely flexible but visually quiet allowing brand to be the dominant essay.

Outdoor Seating

The Outdoor Group is a series of seating developments undertaken for Knoll International. The prospectus developed by the design team embraced the rate of development of the hotel and leisure industries, and this combined very well with Knoll’s determination to lead on product design in this sector beyond its core business of corporate HQ furniture. The seating developed is analogous to two interlocking “tuning fork” frames with a tensile membrane captured by the two frame structures. The seating is transparent and cool for hot climates.

Outdoor Lighting

The Outdoor Lighting Programme was one of several design studies for Concord Lighting. Over a 24 month period a series of developments were undertaken to address a rapidly growing market opportunity in public space lighting. The basis of a much larger industrial system running from 20watt to 500watt outputs is illustrated by the simplest cast forms from the smaller products of this programme.

Nottingham Playhouse

We were commissioned by the UK Arts Council to work with the project architect, Julian Marsh and the UK sculptor Anish Kapoor on the redevelopment of the public space and interiors to the Grade II listed Nottingham Playhouse. The design brief from the project architect was very clear, the arrays of seating and tables had to bring visual discipline and planning clarity to a brand new public space. The briefing in Anish’s London studio was more surprising. Anish was clear that the dominant environmental element was the “sky mirror” and that circular or elliptical furniture arrays were non-starters. Anish was keen to see the urban equipment cleared away as fast as possible and that the new table design should be transient in spirit. The resulting array of 10 bench tables can be cleared from the square in ten minutes. The tables contribute to the geometry and visual discipline of the public space in accordance with the architects brief, providing seating for 100 theatre goers beneath the sky mirror installation by Kapoor.

London Underground Display

Our development of the Real Time Display System followed the London Underground Clock Programme and comprehensive work on the ticketing barrier lines. In detailed customer consultations the need for improved real time information was a clear customer priority. The ten year planned maintenance strategy, implemented during our work on the clock, had reduced installation costs by 90% and health and safety risks of installation and maintenance by a similar percentage. The new clock was so small and light that a service engineers assessment of technical fault lasting more than 2 or 3 minutes led to an instant replacement in the field. A similar diagnostic and planned maintenance strategy was employed for the new Real Time Display System. The key difference in developing the Real Time Displays was simply the architectural scale of the new equipment. With horizontal booms at high level, the diagnostic procedure became laptop based, followed by the removal and replacement of the motherboard.

Knoll

The table and desk programme was commissioned by Knoll Europe. The products and reputation of Knoll International helped define the American Corporate Office during the second half of the 20th Century. The origins of the American “workstation” can be traced to the development of Action Office, and once this inventive step was made furniture corporations across the USA raced to compete with new modular workstation programmes. The American design response was to build furniture systems that allowed the workstation panel or wall components to become the dominant building block of American corporate interiors. These panel and wall components served to divide Architectural interiors, describe boundaries to activities and define the edges of “my workplace”. We were approached by Knoll Europe to challenge the historic heaviness of the American workstation and to develop a table – desk programme which was more suited to the tradition of European Corporate architecture, a programme devoted to transparency, the minimisation of mass and the emergent requirement for increased mobility. The design study embraces a lightweight frame system bonded together via corner connectors that integrate small capsules of low melt adhesive.

Horizon

The Horizon programme of exhibition and event lighting structures was commissioned by Concord Lighting. Projector lamps that could throw tightly resolved corporate images 15 metres were becoming an industry expectation. Emerging die cast luminaires that could project high resolution images this distance weighed several kilograms with metal halide lamps, running gear, glass lenses and image focus equipment on board. Horizon emerged from three concurrent market requirements. Firstly; the need to span several metres of exhibition or gallery space with structural integrity, secondly; to integrate a massive portfolio of Concord’s existing display lighting products and finally; that all of this should leave maximum flexibility of the exhibition gallery or retail floor beneath. In an effort to maximise this flexible display area, a series of free standing counterweighted lighting rigs were developed. The largest array of lighting rig covered an area of 2,000 square feet with only four points of contact at ground level.

Homage to Stan

Whilst working with Michael Frye of Concord Lighting, one of our most dynamic industrial clients, we were asked to visit one of the group companies and spend some time with Stan Weitzel, Head of Engineering. Stan was close to retirement and falls into the “fundamentalist” camp of lighting engineers. Part of Stan’s career included his great pride in developing an early linear luminaire that became standard issue in all UK submarines. Stan’s background was robust, pragmatic and functional and unlike most engineers didn’t give a damn about the way things looked while ever the worked efficiently and made sense. Homage to Stan is precisely that, a luminaire with Churchilean overtones in homage to a great engineer.

Fibre Optic Clock

A UK industrial client purchased an emerging glass extrusion company and asked Atkinson Design to do a fibre applications study. The study was much shorter and faster than a carbon fibre study previously undertaken for a UK aerospace client, but embraced an overview of future opportunities. The fibre optic clock was one of the applications sitting in the consumer products category of that study and allows the technical – optical tale of white light to be animated through the product.

Hazel Duct

Shortly after our Liverpool Street and Bishopsgate Lighting schemes were completed we fell into small dispute with our landlords over the quality of light in our R and D workspace. The industrial ceiling was painted matt black and for those of us working 18 hours a day the lack of brightness was becoming an issue, particularly when very fine detail was being developed on models. The landlord wouldn’t fund the contractor costs for several coats of white paint to a few thousand square feet and we couldn’t sustain this impossible disruption and downtime. The precursor model for Hazel Duct emerged in two hours. Developed by Jon Laws (senior designer at Atkinson Design) the initial mock up demonstrated a larger than human scale column luminaire and reflector. The luminaire provided an autonomous island of high quality reflected light that could trace the perpetual movement and reconfiguration of the studio. The proposal was so incredibly simple, six staff, six luminaires. Concord Lighting were quick to see the benefits and flexibility. Once we showed Hazel Duct at the Hanover Light Show Siemens became the first customer, RIBA the second and the United Nations HQ in Geneva the third.

Duke of Edinburgh Award

The Duke of Edinburgh Award was commissioned by the Design Council as an award to the industrialist Robin Herd. The shortlist for the award was down to two. On one side the engineering team from Rolls Royce with the RB211 engine and on the other Robin. When we asked why had the Duke decided to give the award to Robin we received the following answer: “52 cars were entered for the 48 hour endurance race and only 15 finished…all 15 were built by Robin Herds company in Oxfordshire, no other competitor completed.” Armed with this persuasive description we spent a couple of hours in informal discussions with Robin at his March Racing HQ. Robin proved to be a charming and self effacing industrialist…he simply wanted a sun dial for his Oxfordshire home. The only design clues given included Robin’s Oxford Blues in cricket, his movement into property investment in Manhattan and that his Oxfordshire home had a south facing terrace in Cotswold stone. The sundial tries to capture some of Robin’s energy and achievement. The cast bronze pedestal will patinate with age, whilst the calibrated titanium gnomon will appear brighter with time.

Chandelier

The chandelier is an exuberant design study for our own design studio first floor lobby. The lobby is a cubic space penetrated by a series of small fire rated windows that allow daylight to enter in a controlled manner but more significantly allow the trace of summer and autumn sunsets. The height of the lobby ceiling would not accommodate a conventional chandelier so the stepped geometry arises from both the stairs beneath and the otherwise compressed height between floor and ceiling. Having drawn up the overall assembly and built a couple of soft models we commissioned our development engineer Janu Pap and the jeweller Nick Aikman to make various key elements. The projector lamps in the foreground cast dramatic shadows of the Sun, the Moon and Saturn onto the titanium screens. The screen elements are analogous to sight screens familiar at County cricket grounds. Instead of clarifying sight, they provide backdrops to hold silhouettes.

Carbon Fibre Group

The Carbon Fibre Group of products were developed as part of a “blue sky” design study for a large UK industrial engineering group. The division of GEC were building development parts for the new European Fighter aircraft alongside other military components. As part of their management teams determination to diversify from an overdependence on military equipment, major orders had been secured in high tech construction industry sales. We were appointed after several interviews to take this diversification / evaluation one step further. The series of development projects included marine equipment, where the strength to weight ratios of carbon fibre elements really compete, and on into consumer products and contract goods. The work illustrated shows the development of an office chair structure where 90% of all mechanism has been stripped away. The evolving structural sections of the carbon fibre frame deliver all of the necessary resilience and compliance of good ergonomics. Whilst the materials are exotic the design principles embrace a “less is more” approach.

Axiom

Axiom is a programme of corporate office furniture designed for one of the leading Scandinavian furniture industries with manufacturing facilities in Norway. The client had built unprecedented market share with a network of national dealerships. However the Oslo economy was becoming so prosperous that leading international manufacturers from Europe and the USA were targeting Norwegian Corporate and Government customers and our clients domestic market share was reducing year on year. The precedent for Axiom was established at Board level and Marketing targeted the UK, Holland and Denmark as key export territories. Approximately six months was devoted to visiting key Corporates, Government department procurement bosses and leading national architects. The visits were to engage and interview these decision makers or market guardians to establish their views on market requirements and market futures. The market research activities embraced detailed meetings and presentations by Shell, BP, The Rabbo Bank, The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and The Dutch Ministry of Agriculture. A series of fundamentally different performance criteria emerged from these studies in four countries, most notably the absence of daylight penetration in UK corporate floor plates. Other key issues embrace the polar opposite views of private office and open plan, how each territory powers and distributes network cables, and how shallow most European building plans are, again linked to health and well being rather than the economies of scale prevalent in the UK. Axiom emerged three years later and responded to the exceptional briefing dialogues in four European markets.

London Underground Clock

Our work for London Underground included the development of a new digital clock and timing system. The project required a detailed survey of 32 underground stations. London Underground demonstrates incredible diversity in built environment with infinite variation in architectural scale, form, volume, decorative treatments, materials, daylight and illuminated conditions. In addition the deeper central London Stations impose considerable electrical surge, vibration, air quality and health and safety responsibilities. The design challenges for the clock included a human sciences insight into “how we see time” in a complex urban environment, how to respect the historic identity of London Underground and how to develop a new display technology with a targeted 10 years mean time to failure. Part of the design process included a European Technology search of 220 display manufacturers. Atkinson Design created a shortlist of the eight leading display technology manufacturers based upon technology reviews and supplier demonstrations. Precedent clocks cost £4,000 + and failed in six and a half weeks, our mean time to failure had reached eight and a half years with a factory gate unit cost of £250 by the end of development.

“This design met the brief completely. Their reputation has been built on scrupulous research. Atkinson Design are highly recommended in projects involving complex and technical issues.”

Christopher Nell, Head of Environments, London Underground Ltd.

Boots

We have worked with several brand teams at Boots on some of the most significant cosmetics products in the market. In the case of Botanics we were commissioned to design the retail display that brought the brand together as one collection for the first time, this was followed by a very successful launch into 60 stores and led, within a year, to the Botanics Cosmetics brief which was launched with equal success. The work undertaken on No.7 was really a start from scratch briefing. In competition with several UK retail design specialists ADA won the competitive pitch. The clients view was to pursue the proposed design strategy from ADA which realised three key design objectives simultaneously. To respect the No.7 brand aura whilst reducing its in store scale and complexity to an absolute working minimum. To reduce the commercial tooling for over four hundred brand products to a set of six modular industrial components. To reduce lighting energy costs for the brand in a six hundred store roll out by £750,000 over five years. Despite the rigorous simplification and rationalisation described, brand sales increased in the UK by 10% in year one and ROI for the entire investment occurred within the same calendar year.

Salt, Pepper, Mustard, Vinegar

The work was commissioned as a thank you present for our retiring CEO Ralph Atkinson. In addition to a party with a lot of longstanding clients and friends present, we felt the need to design something rather than buy a standard product. In an effort to make it all the more poignant and personal we commissioned our development engineer Janu Pap and the jeweller Nick Aikman.