Date: 2008-11-19 09:36:09 Created: 2008-11-16 10:15:33
The Enlightenment is a book-shaped lamp made by Dutch Studiomeiboom. It looks cool, uses a low-energy bulb, and part of the profits go to charity. What's not to like? When I first read about it sometime in spring of 2008 I found it a fun idea and made a mental note about it. After accidentaly breaking one of my mom's lamps and realizing I could use some more fun decorations I went ahead and ordered two. At the time of typing I haven't actually given the second one away yet, but it's good to get impressions down while they're fresh, right?
I had some trouble ordering my lamps as the good Studio's credit card processing partner either had some kind of problem or was improperly configured. Whatever the reason, I simply couldn't pay by credit card and instead went through the new experience of making an international money transfer through my online bank. Fortunately both I, my bank and the provided instructions were up to the task and it didn't take long until it was all done. After a quick email exchange to check that I had done everything right, I just sat back and waited for delivery. I can't say how long it actually took to arrive because the postal service somehow lost the first delivery notice before it reached me. I only got the second, rather stern, warning telling me I had five days or something similar left to pick up my package in. Counting backward, I guesstimate that my lamps got here within a week or so. I rushed out and picked them up and all was well.
Lamp package safely home, I eagerly unpacked my own lamp. The package contained a paper (literally, it's one A4) in Dutch, the lamp itself and one low-energy bulb.
Nice and simple, just what a lamp should be.
So, I unpacked the bulb, undid the screw on the underside of the lamp, and ...
Hm.
Got stuck. No part of the lamp seemed to want to give way to allow lamp insertion. Worse, there were no instructions or indications as to where one should push or pull. Nothing apart from the power cord provided an obvious grip either.
Not wanting to start my enlightened life by accidentally breaking my designer lamp, I got myself together and went online to search for ... enlightenment.
It turned out that this was one of those cases where the net let me down. The official site provided no instructions. And all the whole rest of the web had to offer were countless gadget blogs repeating the same single press release with accompanying product shots. Oh, and insightful comments along the lines of "Cool idea!" of course. I can't help but wonder: how long do all those press-release blogs last? How long does anyone follow one of them? Do they make anyone any money? If not, why are they there? Most importantly, wouldn't everyone be better off just finding something with actual content to surf? There really didn't seem to be a single person out there who had bought an Enlightenement and bothered to tell anyone about it.
This actually makes me feel like I'm contributing something here ...
I quickly dismissed any hopes of finding an answer online and simply emailed Studiomeiboom for help. They quickly responded, mailing me a PDF (the text of which for some reason rendered amusingly wrong on the iPhone) which described with both text and photos how to open the lamp.
Simply undo the screw and pull the bottom out, tugging a bit at the power cord if needed to get it moving.
Easy enough, but shouldn't a design studio feel a sense of failure when they manage to both make the process non-obvious and miss including instructions?
It's a lamp, it works really well. I think it looks good.
Figuring actual images may be more useful in this case, I snapped a whole bunch and put up on Flickr.