Joe Scog: The British lighting brand making necessity the mother of production

‘Why are we making so much stuff?’ questions Joe Scog’s maverick founder, Domenico Scognamiglio. ‘I don’t want to produce something just for the sake of it.’ Joe Scog makes lights. But the British brand designs them not to a seasonal agenda, nor because there’s a trade fair just around the corner and a stand calling out for attention-grabbing sculptures in LED. It makes them squarely because a need meets a way to produce something that doesn’t explode carbon levels by seeking to capture globally scattered skills and materials. And that isn’t necessarily something you can timetable. ‘I want to make products born of a need only.’

Making to need with locally sourced materials and skills is a sentiment that, if not rare, is rarely faithfully pursued in the industry; it’s hardly the business plan of millionaires. But Scognamiglio sticks to his guns. The latest need is being satisfied by the IO Table Lamp. It follows the brand’s last ‘new’ product, 2020’s Lockdown Task Lamp, which was conceived when an order for four task lights coincided with shut borders, and Scognamiglio turned to homegrown parts and skills. It resulted in a finely engineered, fiercely elegant, articulated lamp, the shade made from a ready-made part that serves as the ceiling rose for another Joe Scog product, the Guinevere pendant. Before that came the NYC LED Pendant, inspired by the heavy steel engineering used in bridges and railway arches in New York and sparingly created using stock-size flat aluminium bar girders.

Economy of waste is equally a driving principle behind IO. ‘Yes, it is another globe with a marble base,’ says Scognamiglio, ‘but the ones I see are just introduced because it’s the trending material. Just for the sake of it.’ IO has a base fashioned from off-cuts of marble kitchen tops – spotted in a skip on a visit to the HND stone factory in Worcester – and a glass sphere, handblown in Bromsgrove. Previously Scognamiglio’s only experience of glass globes made with the necessary threaded neck for inserting fittings hailed from Murano, but on a trip to a garden centre in Worcestershire, he discovered the work of Top Glass’s Stuart Fletcher and a new partnership was born. ‘It’s a heavier, chunkier glass than Murano, but it makes it more robust as a product.’

It’s clear that Scognamiglio is far from your average lighting designer. In fact, the London-based Anglo-Italian likes to make clear that he is not, in fact, a designer. Following in the footsteps of his father, the eponymous ‘Joe Scog’, he graduated in mechanical engineering and worked as a project engineer and draughtsman for lighting systems, including bespoke manufacturing projects which led to him developing his own designs as early as the 1990s.

For the past 20 years, however, he has been a distributor of fine Italian lighting in the UK, which has given him fluency in the language of Italian design. A few years ago, a client’s unanswered need saw him combine his knowledge of engineering and fine lighting design with his familiarity of British workshops specialising in wood and metal parts, to produce for him the George pendant. As Joe Scog’s founding product, the George pendant set the tone for a line of products born of necessity and not retrospectively fitted with a story. 

A large part of the vision is busying the hands of British engineers and craftsmen, throwing the spotlight on their talent, and producing to order. Scognamiglio’s own talent, meanwhile, is for conceiving the beautiful polished designs from off-cuts, parts and processes he finds on his travels. His radar is always on when visiting workshops, clocking waste products that can find a life in lighting design, or discovering parts and skills – not necessarily employed for the lighting industry, but which might adapt to it. 

It is even switched on when pursuing his past-time, go-karting. Serving as his team’s mechanic he has discovered that go-karting owner-drivers are amazing engineers and they have introduced him to people with skills such as brazing with brass and bronze. ‘It’s heavy engineering; the world of design to them is a bit flowery and nonsense, but they are able to give me solutions. I’m picking up little engineering ideas.’ Indeed, he has used some karting components in a bespoke lighting project for Workform. ‘There’s no reason why these things can’t cross over.’

Talking to Scognamiglio is a valuable lesson in how a step backwards out of the mindset of mass production, can be a step forward for times when superfluity and waste are the enemies of our environment. 

© Architonic

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