The Lightbone Floor Lamp Looks to a Japanese Bamboo Forest

It only takes a glance to see where the Lightbone floor lamp got its monicker – the connection point between the spherical glass globes and the wooden sections. Inspired by a bamboo forest on a trip to Japan and designed by FÄRG & BLANCHE for Oblure, Lightbone was originally exhibited during Milan Design Week 2017 as part of the “Armour Mon Amour” exhibition. At that point of the conceptual phase, the floor lamp was textile and measured up to three meters tall! In the following years it’s continued to evolve into the product you see here.

“We are really happy that we were able to develop this version of the Lightbone together with Oblure,” said the designers, Fredrik Färg and Emma Marga Blanche. “This time in solid Oak and all made in Sweden.”

The floor lamp can easily be used next to a sofa, but also looks amazing in a group or two or three. Multiples begin to resemble a small forest or act to divide spaces in hospitality projects.

Lighbone is available in natural Oak with a Black stain, Smoked Oak, and Cobalt Blue. It’s also available in custom colors on request.

To lean more about LIGHTBONE floor lamp, visit oblure.com.

Mizetto’s Summer Collection Tests Design’s Boundaries

Creative and fun, Mizetto’s Summer 2023 Collection lives somewhere between work and play. The brand has pushed its own capabilities, exploring new materials, production methods, and functionality. Made in Sweden, the latest release includes a wood chair, a versatile table with attachments, a leaning piece, modular planters, and a trash/recycling bin. All share the qualities of clean lines and curves and leave you wanting to experience each for yourself. Known for its color combinations, Mizetto has also added five new “Nordic noir” hues: rusty burgundy, cloudy latte, forest green, latte, and dusty blue.

Perhaps the most curious addition is Lumber by Addi, a piece meant for leaning, lingering, and loitering. The soft beam’s release marks the first upholstered product introduced by the brand. It’s a great answer to adding seating to small spaces, and we can’t help but note its resemblance to a dynamic piece of gymnastics equipment. A quick place to stop on the go for a coffee or email check, Lumber’s small tray-like table adds further functionality to a piece with no obvious front or back. It can even be hung on a wall for maximum space saving. Lumber’s upholstery is flameproof wool, with a cover that’s fully removable, repairable, and exchangeable. The legs are powder coated metal.

A wooden chair is new territory for Mizetto, so they turned to an expert for help – Finish-Swedish furniture designer and woodworker Sami Kallio. The Embrace armchair was a result of the brand lacking seating in their own spaces, and shortly after, Kallio walked in with a fully functioning prototype.

“A few alterations later, Embrace was born; a chair that seemingly hugs its user. I love how it can be hung on a tabletop and stacked, but still provide us with all the beauty and comfort we seek in a piece of furniture,” said Rickard Muskala, founder, and chief of product development.

Kallio is also behind the multi-purpose table in the Embrace series.

Playful, fun, and modular, Addi’s Plant Here gives our green friends a pedestal fitting of their mood-enhancing ways. The planter pays attention to the various needs of different varietals through its accessible design, whether you’re a balcony or office gardener. Features include a generous depth, transparent inner pot for easy planting, different heights, shapes, sizes, and colors. Combine two or more to form endlessly possible installations.

Trash and recycling bins are a necessity, but that doesn’t mean they have to look like one. Pelican by Studio Nooi turns them into minimal decorative objects with touchless interaction. Their semicircular shape allows for modular design, creating an oval when placed back to back. Pelican’s design is suitable for residential as well as commercial spaces, and comes in two sizes and a variety of colors.

To learn more about Mizetto’s Summer 2023 collection, visit mizetto.se.

Why Democracies Aren’t More Reliable Alliance Partners

Guest post by Mark Nieman and Doug Gibler

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine set off a security spiral in Europe. Despite US President Biden’s pledge to “defend every inch of NATO territory,” Poland increased its military budget by a whopping 60 percent and asked to have US nuclear weapons based on its territory. Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia also announced sizable defense increases, with Latvia re-instating compulsory military training.

Why didn’t Biden’s pledge reassure these NATO members? Is the alliance’s famed Article 5 promise—that an attack on one member is an attack on all—a less than ironclad guarantee?

NATO is an unprecedented and unique organization of formidable military might. It is also an alliance made up of democracies, which are generally considered more reliable alliance partners: they form more lasting alliance commitments, and honor them at higher rates than autocracies. So why then are the NATO members most vulnerable to Russian aggression also the most skeptical about NATO’s commitment to defend them?

Democracies are often put on a pedestal. It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged among scholars of international relations that democratic countries are qualitatively different from authoritarian regimes—nicer, better, and more cooperative—especially when they interact with one another. Democracies do not fight wars against other democracies, though they are just as likely to fight autocracies as autocracies fight one another. Democracies are more likely to win the wars they do fight. And democracies are more likely to trade with other democracies.

But our research suggests that what drives the effectiveness of alliance isn’t democracy or shared values. Our recent article in The Journal of Politics shows that alliance reliability is driven by strategic geopolitical context and opportunities to renege, rather than domestic institutions.

What exactly would make democratic countries any more reliable allies than autocracies? Standard arguments focus on the nature of democratic norms and institutions, often pointing to their legalistic culture, foreign policy stability, or concern for international reputation. All of these explanations are valid, and many have been backed with sound empirical analysis. But they miss a key difference between democracies and autocracies: geography. A quick glance at a map reveals heavy geographical concentration among democratic countries. What distinguishes these areas of concentration—Western Europe, in particular—is a long history of violent conflict, which, once resolved, has been followed by a long history of peace. The geographical areas of concentration of authoritarian countries, in contrast, are characterized by periods of relative peace, followed by continuous or intermittent violence. This violence often centers around a small set of unresolved contentious issues, with those related to conflicting territorial claims being the most violent.

This geopolitical context matters for tests of alliance reliability: alliances are most likely to be called upon and violated when their geopolitical environment is hostile. In contrast, alliances in peaceful environments are less likely to be called upon, so they are less likely to be broken. So while democracies might appear to be better alliance partners, this is only because their commitments are rarely tested. Indeed, peaceful environments may themselves produce democratic counties. Without the threat of attack by a neighbor, states can devote fewer resources to the military, concentration of power devolves, and focus more on economic development and diversification. Threatening environments, in contrast, encourage greater militarization and power concentration, increasing the prospects of a garrison state and authoritarian regimes. To paraphrase Charles Tilly, war makes the state, but it is much more likely to make an authoritarian state than a democratic one.

In short, once the geopolitical environment is accounted for, democracies have the same reliability as other types of regimes. Instead, it is the strategic environment that seems to best predict whether alliances are honored: the riskier the environment, the more likely allies are to abrogate their commitments.

So are Finland and Sweden right to rush their NATO accession in response to the threat of Russian aggression? Will a formal membership make them safer than a mere promise? Yes, but this answer has nothing to do with the virtues of democracies. Alliances deter aggression, but they do so through the aggregation of capabilities rather than any enhanced commitments stemming from the domestic institutions of its members. Shared democratic institutions did not prevent France from abandoning Czechoslovakia in 1938. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given rise to similar fears of abandonment among NATO’s eastward members. These countries rightfully question whether Germany and France would come to their defense should they become the next target of Russian aggression.

Unable to trust their democratic allies, Eastern European countries are openly calling for assurance from NATO’s long-standing bedrock, the US. When push comes to shove, NATO’s junior partners are smart to not put their faith in a piece of paper and demand more tangible acts of support, such as troop deployments, training, and arms transfers. A promise, even by a democratic state, must be backed by action.

Mark Nieman is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Trinity College at the University of Toronto, and an affiliate of the Data Sciences Institute. Doug Gibler is a Professor of Political Science in the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Alabama.

Apple Maps Redesign Expands to Finland, Norway, and Sweden

Apple today announced that its revamped Maps app is rolling out in Finland, Norway, and Sweden.


The new experience provides more detail, improved navigation, custom-designed 3D models of popular landmarks, immersive turn-by-turn walking directions powered by augmented reality, and more.

Look Around, which was first introduced in iOS 13, is also expanding to all of these countries starting today. Look Around provides 3D street-level imagery in cities where it is available, and it is similar to Google's Street View.

Apple users in the above countries received notifications of the rollout this morning, and Apple Maps expert Justin O'Beirne also catalogued the expansion.

This is the seventeenth time that Apple has expanded its new map data since its public launch in September 2018. It has since expanded to the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, France, Germany, and select other countries and territories.

This article, "Apple Maps Redesign Expands to Finland, Norway, and Sweden" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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As Above, So Below: Vertical Territory in Northern Sweden

Space exploration in northern Sweden often gains meaning in relation to mining. In this blog post, I ask: how does mining serve as a “speculative device” (McCormack 2018) for envisaging a future beyond Earth? I was drawn to the topic of outer space infrastructures by the Swedish Space Corporation’s ongoing expansion of its rocket launch site, located outside the subarctic city of Kiruna. This expansion aims to turn what has thus far been a sounding rocket range into a full-fledged launch site for small satellites, undertaken in anticipation of a dramatic increase in the demand for launch services over the forthcoming decades. The land occupied by the spaceport and its impact area, twice the size of Luxembourg, interferes with the reindeer herding lands of four Sámi villages. In early 2022, I traveled to Kiruna to begin inquiring into the politics of space exploration in Sweden, focusing in part on the relation between the launch site and the reindeer herders. Yet, eluding my questions about space and instead shifting the conversation to mining, several of the herders I spoke with urged me to consider how outer space was often shot through the region’s long-running history of underground resource extraction.

In his book Space in the Tropics, Peter Redfield (2000) investigates the relation between two seemingly separate phenomena in French Guiana: an old penal colony that operated between 1852 and 1943, on the one hand, and the contemporary spaceport from where the European consortium rocket Ariane is launched, on the other hand. Redfield (2000: xiv) asks, “what might it reveal that [these] different things happen in the same place?” The same question can be posed about mining and space in Kiruna, where the city’s surrounding landscapes have long been presented by the Swedish state as resourceful and available for exploitation. Inspired by Redfield’s question, here I attend to a series of negative, positive, historical, and “speculative relations” (Ojani 2022) between mining and space as invoked by reindeer pastoralists, local residents, politicians, and space actors in subarctic Sweden.

Mining and Space

For reindeer herders working within the launch site’s impact area, space sometimes held a oppositional relation to mining in that the spaceport helped keep new mining initiatives at bay. In a context long characterized by resource extraction, discrimination, and marginalization, one exploiter prevents herders’ ever-shrinking grazing areas from further destruction by other exploiters. While often critical of its placement on their lands and the various forms of disturbance created by its surrounding infrastructure, the herders occasionally emphasized the launch site’s utility. For example, only a few years ago, it became the reason for halting mineral prospecting in the area. Hence, while some of the herders expressed deep anxiety about falling rockets near their animals, others were quick to point out that they were in fact fortunate to have a relatively good collaboration with the Swedish Space Corporation. In response to my queries about space, the herders switched to other, more pressing concerns: mining initiatives located outside the spaceport’s impact area, tourism and the increasing use of snowmobiles on their herding lands, and hunters who were lobbying against a state initiative to increase herders’ influence over hunting licenses, among several other issues.

In contrast, local space actors and politicians saw a potentially allied relation between mining and the space industry, calling for stronger synergies between the two. These actors frequently underscored that both industries are not only “hi-tech” but also operate in “extreme environments,” above the atmosphere and below the ground. For them, the connection between mining and space seemed almost self-evident, and there had already been several collaborations between the two industries. For instance, local scientists conducted an experiment using a sealed-off mining area for the detonation of dynamite, the vibrations of which were then measured with infrasound microphones attached onto stratospheric balloons. And as it turns out, the analogy often drawn by my interlocutors between space and the underground is not in any way unique to this particular setting. It also predicates space analogues undertaken in cave-environments elsewhere in the world (see Park 2016).

But the relation between space exploration and mining in this region is also historical. The establishment of the Swedish launch site in the 1960s drew on an already-existing scientific infrastructure whose purpose was atmospheric research and space physics. The development of this scientific infrastructure, in turn, was enabled by an earlier infrastructure that was built for underground resource extraction. This mining infrastructure has a history that stretches back to 17th-century copper and silver mines but most significantly to the late-19th-century establishment of the Kiruna mine, one of the world’s largest underground iron ore mines. It was to a great extent that the existence of what is essentially the mine’s surrounding infrastructure motivated the placement of the rocket base in this particular region.

While local politicians and space actors have long attempted to brand Kiruna as a “space town” (Backman 2015), this history reveals the processes that have made such branding and associated space activities possible to begin with.

By the same token, the vertical territorial understanding (Braun 2000) reflected by ongoing developments around space exploration relies on assumptions about “emptiness” conjured up by the mining industry. Today, such understandings are invoked to render resourceful not only horizontal space and the underground, but likewise vertical space as it extends upwards. Alongside tropes about empty landscapes, the branding of Kiruna as a globally attractive space hub is frequently made with reference to its vast and supposedly unpopulated surroundings as well as its relatively unoccupied airspace.

Mining in Space

In the 1959 Swedish-American science fiction film Space Invasion of Lapland (Rymdinvasion i Lappland), two scientists travel to northern Sweden upon hearing about the landing of a mysterious extraterrestrial object.[1] As viewers, we have already had a glimpse of the latter: the film opens with Sámi reindeer herders awing at the glowing round object as it glides over the subarctic landscape, before finally crashing into a snow-covered mountain. The movement of the presumed meteorite strikes us as eerie and not at all in accordance with the way an actual space rock would behave upon entering into the atmosphere. As the story continues, we gradually come to learn that the puzzle that the travelers have been called upon to unravel ultimately exceeds the grasp of modern science, as the object turns out to be an alien spaceship.

A conversation unfolds between the two scientists onboard a plane bound for Kiruna. Nodding at a boat visible from the plane’s window, the famous geologist, Dr. Wilson, asks his fellow traveler, Dr. Engström, whether he knows what it is. “Ore boats from the Kiruna ore mines, the richest iron deposit in the world,” Dr. Engström replies, upon which Dr. Wilson speculates: “[D]o you think that the magnetic attraction of the mines could have any bearing on the meteor falling there?” His colleague is skeptical, replying, “Come on doctor, like making the meteor skid across the snow for miles?” A brief moment of deliberation follows, before Dr. Wilson finally asks: “Who said it had to be a meteor?”

The speculative relation drawn by Dr. Wilson between the extraterrestrial and the Kiruna mine compels me to also attend to another set of connections drawn by some of my interlocutors. While Redfield’s question about the coincidence of seemingly unrelated phenomena in French Guiana has oriented my attention to infrastructural history, here I would like to return to the relations that my interlocutors themselves drew between things.

A PhD student at the local space campus offered a captivating analogy. Sitting in his office, we were chatting away about everything from aurora borealis and housing in Kiruna to the navigation and control of small satellites for deep space exploration, which was the subject of his doctoral studies. As the conversation went on, he told me that he did not really believe in space colonization in the way this is usually imagined. He did not think that space settlements would emerge as ends in themselves but rather as consequences of off-Earth mining. He brought home this point by way of comparison, suggesting that this is not very different from the way Kiruna did not exist prior to the establishment of the local mine. According to him, there could be no significant reason to settle down in the region prior to the emergence of a mining infrastructure.

Akin to Dr. Wilson’s speculation about the connection between the extraplanetary and the local iron ore mine, my interlocutors, too, made connections, contrasts, and analogies between mining and outer space. At times, the Kiruna mine served as a “technology of the imagination” (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009) or speculative device for envisaging the specific unfoldings of a future beyond Earth.

Conclusion

Scholars have argued that remote sensing technology has served to create and reconfigure environments on Earth, often unintentionally (Sörlin and Wormbs 2018). By affording a view from above and without, satellites have participated in the modification of our ways of conceptualizing and relating to our earthly and atmospheric surrounds. In this blog post, I have tried to highlight a somewhat different matter – namely, how grounded, planetary milieus become infrastructures for envisioning space. These are “the terrestrial localit[ies] of outer space” (Messeri 2016: 163); places and relations – in this case the infrastructural history of a mining town – that reshape landscapes in an immediately material way and occasionally come to inform situated, extraplanetary imaginaries.

Note

[1] The regional designation in the title of this film draws on the discriminatory expression “lapp,” a Swedish term that has been used historically to label the Sámi. This term does not exist in the Sámi languages. In Northern Sámi, this region is known as Sápmi.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Platypus’s contributing editors Kim Fernandes and Yakup Deniz Kahraman for their thoughtful suggestions and comments. This research received funding from the National Science Center, Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.

References

Backman, Fredrick. 2015. Making place for space: A history of “space town” Kiruna 1943-2000. Umeå: Umeå University.

Braun, Bruce. 2000. “Producing vertical territory: Geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada.” Cultural Geographies 7 (1): 7-46. 

McCormack, Derek P. 2018. Atmospheric things: On the allure of elemental envelopment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Messeri, Lisa. 2016. Placing outer space: An earthly ethnography of other worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ojani, Chakad. 2022. “Speculative relations in Lima: Encounters with the limits of fog capture and ethnography.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12 (2): 468-481. 

Park, William. 2016. “Why caves are the best place to train astronauts”. BBC, November 30. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161130-why-caves-are-the-best-place-to-train-astronauts (accessed 5/11/2022).

Redfield, Peter. 2000. Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sneath, David, Martin Holbraad, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. “Technologies of the imagination: An introduction.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 74 (1): 5-30.

Sörlin, Sverker, and Nina Wormbs. 2018. “Environing technologies: A theory of making environment.” History and Technology 34 (2): 101-125.

String Furniture’s Pira G2 Is a Dividing Redesign of a 1955 Classic

Typically, when someone says you’re being strung along, it’s rarely intended to communicate anything positive. But in the case of String Furniture’s modular shelving system, the design classic continues to be associated with the best of modern design – a flexible, expandable, contemporary classic with an airy aesthetic that seems to never wear out its welcome regardless of era or interior space.

If it sounds like I’m an unabashed fan, you’re not mistaken. I recently invested in a 3-panel, 12-shelf configuration for my home office to join a pair of two-tier String Pocket wall units. Designed by Swedish architect Nisse Strinning in collaboration with his wife Kajsa Strinning in 1949, the design retains an inspiring vitality inspiring organization and display.

Today, String Furniture is dipping into their archives to refresh a 1955 classic originally designed by Swedish architect Olle Pira. Designed for the Helsingborg exhibition of 1955 in 1955, the Pira G2 modular shelving system has been updated by architect Anna von Schewen and the industrial designer Björn Dahlström in time for the 2023 Stockholm Furniture Festival, which ended February 11th.

The refreshed design retains the modular spirit of the original, robust yet visually transparent. “The ambition was never to design a retro-style piece of furniture, but rather to embrace the core idea behind the original PIRA and create a taller, wider version” explains Björn Dahlström.

The shelves are made of lacquered steel sheets and secure onto extruded aluminum poles, with a choice of walnut or white oak cabinets and bookends, with each shelf rated for over 110lbs of weight capacity – more than sufficient to ease concerns of any dedicated bibliophile and/or to accommodate for a designer’s large tome library.

While adaptable as a wall-mounted storage and display piece, the Pira G2 truly shines when configured as a free-standing shelving unit, operating both as a display and room divider with each shelf creating a window to the other side and carving out smaller, more intimate spaces in the process.

I’ve been on the hunt for a room divider to visually break up a long room for months now, and at first glance the Pira G2 seems to offer everything I would hope for in a storage solution. Alas, I realized I was indeed being strung along the entire time – at least in my specific case – as the Pira G2’s 318cm max height doesn’t quiet extend sufficiently high enough to secure onto our high ceilings. But for most homes, the Pira G2’s modular sheet-steel construction should offer a centerpiece presence engineered to last a lifetime.

The squeezable tube foods of Sweden

In Sweden, you can find a variety of foods in squeezable tube form. Hear from a "food tube expert" about why this is a thing. Snacks like tubed caviar, mackerel, and bacon-flavored cheese are best enjoyed when squeezed on a piece of toast or a cracker.  — Read the rest

A 1940s Pink Villa Becomes New Home for Luca Nichetto’s Studio

Over the course of a year, designer Luca Nichetto renovated a 1940s pink villa to become his new studio in Stockholm, Sweden. No signs are on display – it looks like a regular house to the average passerby – but the locals now know of it as the Pink Villa. While its pink exterior definitely piques curiosity, it’s the interior that really draws you in.

The renovation and refurbishment of the home began in 2021, along with the interior design, which was done in house. From the sofas to the chairs to the lighting to the plant holders, most of the furnishings throughout were designed by Luca himself.

In the living room, the royal blue Arflex Banah sofa pops with two additional chairs and a bold yellow Float table from La Chance.

Downstairs, pale pink walls set the tone and give nod to the home’s exterior.

A meeting room resides on the ground floor with black Robo Chairs from Offecct. Colorful pieces of glass are displayed throughout adding more color and visual interest.

Upstairs there is Luca’s personal office and additional workspaces for the rest of Nichetto’s team, along with more of his designs, including the Mjölk Réunion lamp (above) and the blue/gray Nico armchair from Bernhardt Design (below).

On weekdays, the Pink Villa is used as Nichetto Studio’s offices and then on weekends the family uses it as a vacation home in the country. An old garage has transformed into a guest room, named the Chalet, with its own living room, bedroom, and bathroom complete with a Swedish sauna.

The new studio is just a seven minute walk to the water and a green area, Branterna, is just a minute away, making it a peaceful place to work or visit.

Photos by Max Rommel.