As seen below, the shape of your average, basic, stationary table lamp hews closely to the "form follows function" ID maxim. Ideally you'd want the light bulb floating in space at a certain height above the table, shielded by a shade. Because bulbs cannot float and need to be wired in, you put in a stalk to support the bulb and house the wiring. Because the narrow stalk cannot balance itself while supporting the bulb and shade, you attach it to a wider, flat base for stability. A designer can make cosmetic adjustments to the form, but most of us rushing to draw a "table lamp" in Pictionary would come up with the same thing.

Now a Las-Vegas-based company called Radast Design is taking the classic form factor but injecting it with new technology. One of the problems with LED lighting, which has been so often hailed as the lighting of the future, is its need for heat sinks; manufacturers that don't want to deal with the added expense and hassle of heat sinks opt instead for weaker bulbs, which is why I find many consumer versions of LEDs so lame—the small LED add-on lamps you can buy for a sewing machine, for instance, are disappointingly wan. With their LightDrive lamp design, Radast has a different solution:

Most integrated LED lamp designs deliberately use low brightness LEDs to avoid dealing with heat. The LightDrive table lamp offers a completely novel approach to light output and thermal management.... By isolating the heat to the base of the lamp, we have engineered a more efficient thermal management solution without the contraints of working around the classic bulb-socket design. The result is a unique looking lamp which operates at only 13 Watts and has no exposed hot surfaces.

What Radast has done is essentially turn the lamp's innards upside-down. The light-producing, heat-generating element is in the base, and fires light upwards through the transparent stalk into a diffuser, up top, residing where the traditional bulb would be. Have a look:

This being a new Kickstarter project, there are no theoretical renderings; the Radast team does display some CAD illustrations, but those are of parts they've actually constructed.

Radast's LightDrive technology doesn't come cheap; each is expected to retail for $799. Kickstarters have an option to snag one for $500, and if all goes right, the company expects to deliver by February of next year.