SPARK
SI-055, from issue6, 2025.
Make Instruments for Noticing
Lisa Abuaf Defcioglu is a New York–based furniture and industrial designer whose work investigates the limits of material and form through a hands-on, experimental practice. Centered on interactivity, she creates objects that invite engagement, bringing a sense of play, curiosity, and discovery into everyday life.
UDÖ This issue of Spark is dedicated to Midnight, how does The Gölge Lamp, a sculptural wooden lamp with a rotatable head that allows the user to change the direction of light, create a ritual for us to see light differently every night?
LA The Gölge Lamp creates a quiet nightly ritual through movement and attention rather than by changing the light source itself. By allowing the user to rotate and redirect the beam, it shifts how shadows travel across a space, revealing different objects and atmospheres each evening. What transforms is not only the direction of illumination, but the relationship between the viewer and their surroundings. Depending on mood or placement, the lamp highlights new textures, surfaces, or forms, encouraging awareness of what is illuminated and what remains hidden. This subtle act of repositioning turns a familiar environment into something continuously rediscovered. Rather than functioning as a static object, Gölge becomes an instrument for noticing — framing light as a way of re-seeing space, night after night.
UDÖ In what ways does observance of light become a part of your design practice?
LA Rather than focusing solely on light itself, I’m drawn to the shadows it produces. Light can feel predictable, but shadow is constantly shifting, revealing new relationships between objects, surfaces, and architecture. These subtle transformations are what guide much of my design thinking. Midnight represents a moment when these shifts become more perceptible — when the world quiets and small changes in light and shadow feel amplified. It’s not simply darkness, but a threshold where perception slows down and space begins to feel more intimate. Gölge embodies this idea through its sculpted wooden form, which both conceals and reveals, allowing light to slip through and create layered shadow patterns. The adjustable head lets the user guide this quiet choreography, shaping atmospheres that evolve throughout the night rather than remaining fixed.
UDÖ How do you bring craft and materiality into your furniture design practice, since all these objects are hand-crafted as 1 to 1 prototypes? (note to Lisa, this is an opportunity to talk about the studio process, the use of different materials from metal, leather, bent plywood to cork.)
LA Material plays a central role in my process, and most projects begin by understanding a material’s behavior before defining a final form. Craft becomes a way of thinking rather than simply a method of making. I work across metal, leather, bent plywood, cork, textiles, and other materials, allowing each to suggest its own structural logic and expressive potential.
The studio process is highly hands-on and iterative. Instead of fully predetermined outcomes, forms emerge through testing — where something can bend, stretch, or hold tension. These discoveries guide the design forward, allowing prototypes to evolve as physical conversations between material, structure, and use.
UDÖ Your design always motivates play and interaction from the person using it. How can adults bring more play into their lives through the objects they bring into our life?
LA Material plays a central role in my process, and most projects begin by understanding a material’s behavior before defining a final form. Craft becomes a way of thinking rather than simply a method of making. I work across metal, leather, bent plywood, cork, textiles, and other materials, allowing each to suggest its own structural logic and expressive potential.
The studio process is highly hands-on and iterative. Instead of fully predetermined outcomes, forms emerge through testing — where something can bend, stretch, or hold tension. These discoveries guide the design forward, allowing prototypes to evolve as physical conversations between material, structure, and use.
photography by Utkan Dora Oncul.
Spark Interview-055