HTSI interviewed Roland Ellis and Dev Joshi for a piece about lighting designers who are inspired by astronomy.
Marion Willingham describes how artists and designers are captivated by the cosmos: “The urge to pull the night sky inside persists today.”
‘At last year’s London Design Festival, Relative Distance debuted Phase, a limited-edition artwork whose waxing and waning is perfectly synchronised with the moon’s real-time orbit. “It’s something that you live with, that changes slowly over time on the calendar scale,” says co-founder Roland Ellis, who drew on the concept of Calm Technology to make the fitting as unobtrusive as possible. Eight thousand LEDs are carefully engineered to emulate natural moonlight and pitch darkness, while a high-resolution composite image from NASA’s 2010 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals the tiniest details of the lunar surface. “It’s a thing that people know, and can get to know again,” says co-founder Dev Joshi.’
To read the full article for free, visit the Financial Times.
HTSI, The Financial Times, January 2025
Image courtesy of Relative Distance, Photography by Jason Ell, Interiors by Elizabeth Franks Studio