Light you can fold flat.

The sculptor Isamu Noguchi visited the Japanese town of Gifu in 1951. For centuries Gifu had made paper lanterns, bamboo ribs wrapped in handmade washi paper, but the craft was fading, unable to compete with the modern world. The mayor asked Noguchi, already a celebrated artist, if he could help. What he made in response he called Akari, a Japanese word that means both light, as in illumination, and lightness, as in weightlessness.

They look impossibly simple. A spiral of thin bamboo, skinned in soft white paper, holding a bulb, giving off a warm, diffuse glow like a paper moon or a held breath. There is nothing to them and everything to them. Switched off, many of them collapse flat, folding down to almost nothing so they can be shipped in an envelope and opened out into sculpture in your hands. Light that folds flat. It sounds like a riddle and it is just paper and bamboo and attention.

Noguchi thought of them as genuine sculptures, not lamps, and he made hundreds of variations over the rest of his life. But he priced them to be owned by ordinary people, not collectors, because the point was to put real sculpture, real beauty, into everyday homes. He was doing two generous things at once, reviving a threatened traditional craft and giving its product away to everyone at a price they could meet.

That is the quiet radicalism of the object. It refuses the usual choice between precious art and cheap product. It is both. A thing a museum would show and a thing a student can afford, made by honouring the hands of craftsmen a modern economy was about to discard.

The lesson is that the genuinely new is often an old thing, seen freshly. Noguchi did not invent the paper lantern. He looked at a craft everyone else had written off as finished, understood what was timeless in it, and carried that forward into something that has never gone out of production since.

What overlooked, old, nearly-lost thing could you carry forward instead of inventing from nothing?