In this exclusive movie, British designer Tom Dixon says the lamp that helped turn his company into an international brand would have been less successful if the design had achieved what he set out to create.

Mirror Ball is a highly reflective lamp consisting of a lightweight transparent plastic sphere coated with a thin layer of aluminium.

The lamp is one of Dixon's best-selling products ? his brand sells over 1,000 every month. However, the British designer claims the success of the product was completely inadvertent.

"Mirror Ball is a sort of failure in design terms," he says in the movie, which Dezeen filmed in Milan.

"I thought that if I made the simplest shape I could get away with in highly polished mirror, it would be invisible because it would reflect its surroundings."
In fact, Mirror Ball's reflectivity makes it highly conspicuous, which Dixon believes is the reason it is so popular.

"In practice, it did the polar opposite," he explains. "It is very much a focal point of a room, almost a blingy object in a way. But it made it a more successful object commercially as a result."

"So that's a lesson for all designers," he adds. "Sometimes your biggest failures could be your biggest successes."

Read more on Dezeen: http://www.dezeen.com/"p=919526

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest architecture and design movies: http://bit.ly/1tcULvh

...