ECAL × HELINOX — POLARIS
10–19.09.2026
Paris Design Week

Polaris, the North Star that once guided travellers, inspires this collection of lights which is presented for the first time during Paris Design Week 2026. In collaboration with Helinox, a brand specialising in ultra-lightweight and compact furniture, ECAL Bachelor Industrial Design students designed ingenious, foldable and portable lights. Made for the outdoors, yet naturally at home anywhere.

Focusing primarily on the tension between technical rigour and poetic simplicity, our approach was to design lights built around Helinox's own connectors and tensioned textiles, rather than creating conventional lamps. Students explored and reinterpreted the brand's core language — its aluminium poles, spring clips, hubs and technical fabrics — imagining how light could travel with us into the wild and back home again. Based on their research, they designed a range of typologies which reimagine the camp light, an object built for necessity, giving it the presence and warmth of a true piece of lighting design.

Their projects take many different forms : a clip-on flashlight that adapts to any tube diameter and swings to direct its beam up or down; a modular hub built around the sunflower connector, letting light be cast wherever it's needed, from a single accent to a full standing structure; a tensioned fabric square that clips onto camp lines to diffuse a soft, ambient glow; a floor lamp whose light module can slide to shift the intensity; a foldable bedside lamp, collapsing flat for storage; and a self-erecting lantern that pops into shape the moment it leaves its pouch, echoing the silhouette of a scout tent.