This 'irradiation' table lamp was designed by Swiss artist, designer and architect Max Bill (1908-1994). It consists of two identical cones of metal sheeting, one to house the lamp and the other the adaptor, with a flexible tube connecting them (which is also intended to act as a carrying handle).

Max Bill was one of the most significant figures in post-war industrial design, due mainly to his role as president of the Swiss Werkbund and as director of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG Ulm), the experimental design school founded in Germany in 1953. The lamp embodies the Werkbund principles of ‘Gute Form’, promoted in annual design awards from 1949, and the title of a book and exhibition by Bill. The Ulm school was intended by its founders as institution of democratic education, devoted to politics and philosophy as well as culture, which would aid in the moral rebuilding of Germany. Plans for the school were directed more firmly towards design when the founders invited Bill to be director. Bill was a former Bauhaus student Werkbund and a major figure in the cause of modernist architecture and design in Europe. The school became the figurehead of Western German modernism in the post-war period, often referred to as a 'new Bauhaus'. In terms of product design, Bill and his colleagues pursued an ideal of rationalist modernism, in visual and philosophical opposition to the streamlined styling of post-war American design.