Lamp

​As many parents will know, getting a teenager out of bed can be an impossible task. Thanks to furniture rental firm Furlenco, such trials may be about to get much harder. Its Pod merges a bed, lamp, flat screen TV and speaker system into one piece of funky millennial furniture.

A light plunger. It sort of sounds like something from a sci-fi novel, doesn't it? In fact, it's a new product just launched on Kickstarter that looks like it combines the concept of a French coffee press with a table lamp, and lets users plunge the light to turn it on or off.

UpLamp utilizes your smartphone's LED flash to create a diffuse light source perfect for bedtimes. The accompanying app lets you control the light using hand gestures and turn it on and off with a clap.

The latest LED lamp takes a different approach by removing a critical component. The Lumir C is designed without any external power supply, operating off of a single candle instead.

The Bluetooth-enabled, origami-inspired Orilamp is designed to unfold and provide up to seven hours of LED light from a single charge.​

The Mstick is a curious little device. It doesn't immediately appear to fall easily into any category and yet has multiple useful functions. It seems conspicuously unusual and yet strangely compelling. It's just an LED light stick. But it's also a timer, an alarm and a weather forecast display.

The Bulbing Lamps from Studio Cheha in Israel use a combination of LEDs and laser-etched acrylic sheets to create 3D lamps from 2D materials. Thus, these lamps create light (and a guaranteed conversation starter) from nothing but an optical illusion.

While cheap, kerosene lamps are bad for the environment and human health. Intended as an alternative in areas with access to electricity, the SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting) lamp burns for eight hours at a time running on only a glass of water and two teaspoons of salt.

In exceptional circumstances, the camera flash on a typical smartphone is bright enough to double up as a flashlight. With the addition of Travelamp, your smartphone can use this bright light as an impromptu bedside lamp or nightlight.

Brick Lamp is a minimalist lamp shaped like a brick. More than that, it's designed to reconnect us with the act of flooding our homes with light, with the simple act of picking it up switching it on and off.

While OLED technology is increasingly being applied to things like TVs, it can also serve as an efficient form of lighting. Canada's OTI Lumionics has developed its own cost-effective OLED lighting system, and incorporated it into the $239 aerelight. We recently got to try one out.

The need to minimize the energy we use need not necessarily impact adversely on the form or function of a device. This premise is elegantly demonstrated by Ambio, a "bacterial lamp" created by designer Teresa van Dongen. Ambio merges sleek design with a soft glow created by bioluminescence.