Although i have a well documented faible for CFLs and i maintain a growing collection of CFL pictures in one of my flickr sets, all the photos i have taken so far originate from the middle east (the CFLs usually found in the west are pretty uninspiring). Fortunately a young entrepreneur (who is otherwise in the fairly stupid business of selling old style telephone handsets for mobile phones) has come to the rescue and created the PLUMEN, a low-energy light bulb prototype with a twist:

Some people find them unpleasant, but low-energy lightbulbs are a necessary innovation. Their presence in our lives explain the PLUMEN’s designers, “should be seen as an advantage to be celebrated by drawing, sculpturing, or scrawling in the air with light. The bulbs should not be viewed as an afterthought but instead as a centerpiece. then people might begin to buy these bulbs through genuine desire rather than mere moral obligation.”

Not sure if i buy this tear-jerk bullshit about genuine desire to buy a lightbulb, but at least this prototype has managed to get into the New York MOMA where the PLUMEN is currently on display at the ‘Design And The Elastic Mind‘ exhibition (extremely annoying flash site, that takes forever to load!).

Personally i think that cheap chinese flower shaped CFLs look much better…