: Slim Jim

Lighting designer Pablo Pardo has been a rich resource for Haworth, having created the Best of NeoCon®, Best of Competition Award-winning desk light Brazo for the Holland, Mich.-based company in 2007. But as elegant as Brazo is, its complicated design has defied translation into the many different types of lighting required for integration across the full range of systems furniture. Now, along comes Pardo's LIM—short for Light In Motion—a multipurpose, multitask LED light with elemental structure and multiple reconfigurations that is highly adaptable to a variety of applications within the workstation, as well as institutional, hospitality, and residential settings.

"LIM starts out as a flat extrusion that can be formed to comply with Haworth's numerous mounting applications," explains Pardo. "The customizability of LIM is far greater than the more sophisticated Brazo. I wanted to create a system that would allow Haworth to seamlessly integrate lighting into its entire product line, so it is more about the light source being an essential tool, rather than an addition." LIM's intent, according to Haworth, is to provide an LED light mechanism that, depending on its form and method of attachment, can be a primary or secondary light source, as well as high-performance and highly adjustable.

Pardo first brought Haworth a single table lamp version of LIM, but the expansive possibilities of the concept immediately were obvious to Ralph Reddig of the Haworth Design Studio, who was charged with adapting LIM's basic design to the company's various lighting applications. What resulted is a comprehensive product line—blessed by Pardo—that includes pivot, under-surface, panel-mounted, storage-mounted, and floor versions, in addition to the table lamp. A second phase of product line development will add still more versions.

"When we first saw LIM, it was obvious that we could stretch the design and create a whole family," says Reddig. "It was a light we could use in all different applications, keeping the same clean, consistent look." And the fact that LIM only has a few adaptable and recyclable parts lends itself to easy, efficient production, which in turn manages costs. "The light, gestural, clean form of LIM is something we've been trying to get to for a long time," Reddig adds.

Particularly noteworthy are LIM's very slender profile, its magnet interface, which allows for intuitive assembly and mounting by the user, and its light output and power usage. The LED array uses only 2.8 watts on the low setting and 7.3 watts on the high setting, but still gives 50 foot candles of light output. "I was driven by trying to get as much functionality as possible in as little a footprint as possible," says Pardo. "This is a much more sustainable design approach."

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