In Conversation with Jasem Pirani and Huzefa Rangwala, MuseLAB
Q1. Sustainable design has become a massive marketing buzzword. How does this curation prove that these lamps are genuinely eco-friendly?
Agreed. We call it greenwashing because all the “going green” brochures and products that look beautifully earthy are, in actuality, held together by toxic resins that end up in the exact same landfill. Hence, we decided to strip away the marketing fluff and replace it with physics. We gave the 20 designers four absolute non-negotiables: no virgin materials, zero glue or chemical resins, built entirely for easy disassembly, and either compost back into the soil or remain a completely pure, reusable material. If you can’t take the lamp apart with a basic screwdriver in five minutes, it doesn’t get to stand in the Gallery of Sustainability, which makes this exercise an engineering constraint more than a marketing claim.
Q2. Reclaiming materials from existing waste streams can be incredibly unpredictable. What was the most surprising or unusual material a contributor successfully tamed for this exhibition?
That unpredictability is exactly where the magic has happened. When you hand a brief like this to 20 incredibly restless minds- architects, interior designers, product designers, material explorers who are walking the talk, they go beyond just looking for nice pieces of wood. We have designers experimenting with everything from live bio-materials like lab-grown mycelium structures that act as light diffusers, to industrial sludge and stone slurry rescued from local quarries that usually just choke rivers, now turned into stable, structural bases. It’s wild to see how raw waste can look so incredibly beautiful when treated with the right respect and design intelligence.
Q3. Raw, natural, and reclaimed materials are inherently imperfect and volatile. Where is the line between celebrating a material’s natural flaws and delivering a product that feels unfinished or unrefined?
Honestly, this exercise and the collection aren’t about how smooth the surface is; it’s about intent. An unfinished product feels lazy, an honest product feels studied. When a master craftsman or a sharp architect works with a flawed piece of local stone or a volatile organic texture, we believe they are celebrating its geometry rather than hiding its scars. The refinement comes from the precision of the details, the elegance of the mechanical joints, and the way the lamp’s two distinct elements, the Root and the Radiance, interact. A raw material only looks unrefined if the design lacks discipline. Here, the discipline is tight and studied.
Q4. A product only lasts if the owner actually cares about it. How does one design an object so deeply that a consumer actively chooses the chore of repairing it over the thrill of replacing it?
You do it by building an emotional relationship, and that relationship starts with transparency. When a product is a sealed plastic box glued together in a factory, you have no relationship with it; when it breaks, it’s trash and ends up in a landfill. But when you look at a lamp and can clearly see the joints, the screws, and the friction holding it together, it triggers something human. It empowers you. Repairing it doesn’t feel like a chore. In fact, it feels like an act of stewardship. You care about it because you actually understand how it breathes. The 20 minds are designing lamps to be lifelong companions and not just one-night stands. Wait, one light stand! Maybe we call it that, haha!
Q5. One-off exhibition pieces are easy to control, but the planet needs systemic change. Can the hyper-local, artisanal methods used in these lamps actually be scaled up to mass production, in your opinion?
Mass production, as we know it, is when millions of identical plastic things are shipped across oceans and fundamentally broken. So no, you shouldn’t scale that up. But what you can scale is the philosophy and the idea of decentralised scaling. Imagine if factories stopped using toxic binders and shifted entirely to mechanical assembly. Imagine if regional production hubs used the unique waste streams of their own specific cities. This exhibition at Design Democracy 2026 isn’t a blueprint for a single giant factory. We are trying to make a proof of concept for a new mentality that the mass manufacturing industry desperately needs to adopt.
Q6. Jasem and Huzefa, what, according to you, is the most overhyped trend in the design market today, and how do you keep your own architecture and interior projects grounded in substance rather than hype?
The most overhyped trend is definitely aesthetic sustainability, where designers end up painting things green, using token bamboo accents, or slapping a recyclable label on a product that requires specialised facilities to actually recycle. It then becomes an act of designing for the photograph rather than the lifecycle. At MuseLAB, we keep ourselves grounded by obsessing over the process’s honesty. While curating this gallery, we asked ourselves these uncomfortable questions: Where did this come from? How is it held together? What happens to it when the client wants a change in ten years? If the answer relies on hype or cosmetics to look good, we throw it out and start over. In our limited knowledge, we believe that substance is just common sense with a lot of design discipline applied to it.
