.lumen at Romanian Design Brands 2026

From June 5 to 21, .lumen is part of Romanian Design Brands | Objects of Romanian Design, an exhibition included in the Local Design | Bucharest Design Festival Professional format, hosted at CINA building, 10 Benjamin Franklin Street, Bucharest.

The exhibition is curated by Mihnea Ghilduș, product designer, founder of the Dizainăr platform, Creative Director of DZNR Studio, and lecturer at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, and brings together 9 brands that each show, in their own way, what contemporary Romanian design looks like today.

For us, the invitation to be part of this exhibition means a great deal. First, because .lumen is Designed and Made in Romania, but also because we are taking part in an event that highlights the role of design in everyday life — as an invisible infrastructure shaping the way we live, use, feel, and understand the objects around us.

The .lumen Glasses for the Blind are the result of a long process of design, research, testing, and refinement, in which every decision had to answer a very concrete question: how can technology become more intuitive, more wearable, and more useful for someone navigating without sight, regardless of the environment, language, or culture they come from?

That is exactly why, in the .lumen capsule at Romanian Design Week, we chose to show this journey in full.

The installation follows the evolution of the Glasses for the Blind, from the earliest prototypes to the current version of the product, and places the final object in dialogue with the process behind it. Visitors will be able to see three key stages in the product’s development: DevKit, DemoKit, and PilotKit, alongside ProdKit, the first commercial generation. The capsule is conceived as both a product display and a process display, where formal evolution goes hand in hand with technological and usability decisions.

We will also show how the .lumen Glasses work today: from the role of Pedestrian Autonomous Driving (PAD AI), developed for pedestrian navigation, to the way the glasses translate the surrounding space into instructions that are easy to follow. PAD AI was built to understand the environment, calculate safe routes, and guide the user in real time.

The context from which .lumen emerged remains simple and difficult to ignore: worldwide, there are around 338 million visually impaired people, while the number of guide dogs is only 28,000. That is where our question began: how can you replicate the benefits of a guide dog in a product that is scalable, wearable, and available to many more people?

.lumen’s answer was a headset that uses haptic and auditory feedback to guide the user safely. If a guide dog pulls the user’s hand, .lumen uses directional haptic feedback to discreetly indicate the right direction to follow.

In the section dedicated to explaining the system, we will talk about vibration and audio as languages of orientation. In the case of .lumen, haptics are the main mechanism for direction: on the forehead, the glasses vibrate to indicate a safe direction of movement. Audio complements the experience by signaling important objects and cues without covering the user’s ears. In tests carried out by the team, vibrations proved to be the preferred solution for directional navigation for more than 90% of the blind individuals involved.

We will also include an audio description area, accessible through headphones, so that visitors can experience the content from a perspective closer to the logic of the product itself. For us, it was important that this capsule also be about how the product feels and how it is understood.

We are grateful to be part of a selection that shows the diversity and strength of contemporary Romanian design. And we are proud to be able to say, in this context, something that matters deeply to us: .lumen is Designed and Made in Romania.

If you are in Bucharest between June 5 and 21, we invite you to visit our capsule at the CINA building and discover up close what a product born locally, but designed to matter globally, looks like.

See you at Romanian Design Week. Tickets available here.