In the Spotlight
A product developed by Cambridge Industrial Design for leading lighting company Osram is in the spotlight after winning a major international design prize.
The Osram Kreios G1, a new LED image projector for spotlighting and spot messaging, was selected as one of 62 ‘Best of the Best’ products in the Red Dot Design Award of 2012. Cambridge Industrial Design provided full design support to Osram in developing the product, which is used for illuminated advertising and brand promotion in settings such as trade shows and retail centres.
The German-run Red Dot Design Award is one of the world’s largest and most respected design competitions. Osram was one of 1,800 companies and designers from 58 countries that submitted a total of 4,515 products for consideration in the 2012 awards. Products are assessed, by a jury of world-renowned design experts, on innovation, functionality, ease-of-use and environmental impact.
The Kreios G1 LED image projector
Compact, lightweight and silent in use, the Kreios G1 is a major advance on existing LED projectors. Its high-powered, long-life LED light source and dedicated optical system allows gobos – templates carrying company logos or other messages or images – to be projected in crisp, high definition onto any surface.
Up until now, projectors have been heavy, hot, noisy and hard to position without tools. The compact, light design of the Kreios G1 makes it easy to mount on walls, ceilings and floors. It’s highly adjustable by hand, too: the projector has a tilting angle of 120 degrees and can pivot around almost its complete axis. And, despite delivering a dazzling 800 lumens of light, its low heat output allows passive cooling without any moving parts, so that it can run silently and reliably.
The product also features a faster, more user-friendly way of substituting images, as Alex Jones, owner of Cambridge Industrial Design, explains: ‘With Osram’s engineers in Germany and the USA, we came up with the innovative way that the gobos are held in place in the projector – using magnets. Gobos are simply and swiftly replaced and the angle of the projector easily adjusted by hand.
‘We’re delighted that the Kreios G1 has won such a prestigious design award. It was a great team effort with Osram and its suppliers, especially as timescales were short, with just two months from concept to first prototypes and another three months to first production samples. A Red Dot Award is a big achievement for us and shows that manufacturers don’t need large consultancies to create award winning products.’
OSRAM will present the Kreios G1 at Prolight+Sound (21 March to 24 March 2012 in Frankfurt). The booth is located in Hall 9.0, Stand D10.
Red Dot awards – http://en.red-dot.org/1402.html
Prototype support from Solve3D – http://www.solve3d.com
Osram – http://www.osram.com/osram_com/press/_trade_press/2012/kreios-g1