#future of light

[futureoflight]

Let’s Discuss the Future Role of the Lighting Designer...

Three advanced Lighting Designers, Paul Traynor, Neil Skinner and Tapio Rosenius, engage one another in a discussion about the future role of the Lighting Designer. Get a glimpse into their innovative projects and hear a snippet of what they have to say regarding the future of their profession in this teaser video. The full interview will be live at the beginning of May. Register now so you don’t miss out!

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PSFK Future Of Light Report

PSFK Future Of Light Report

PSFK’s Future of Light report is an in-depth survey of the trends shaping light at the intersection of technology, community and sustainability.This survey looks at key trends that focus on how light

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5 ways wearable tech is lighting up our wardrobes

[futureoflight]

Designing Shadows

By Laura Taylor, Lighting Innovation, Philips Lighting

Are shadows merely an absence of light? Or are they actually central to creating an entrancing lighting experience?

('Solid Light' by Heathcliffe O'Malley)

Several installations displayed as part of London Southbank Centre’s Light Show, explored interactions with light and shadow. Anthony McCall’s installation of ‘solid light’ is a compelling experience where you cannot resist touching or standing in the rays of light and creating ‘beams’ of shadow.

  ('Effe naar de poppenhuis'. Project by Licht Aan -  Jolanda Tielens)

In a similar style, Conrad Shawcross’s kinetic sculpture Slow Arc Inside a Cube creates dynamic abstract shadows on the walls, ceiling and floor, which gives a disorienting feeling of relative movement when you stand or walk through the space.

Making creative use of shadows is not new in commercial lighting either. The Philips Metronomis street lighting can project aesthetic light effects onto the ground below, creating ambiance and blending lighting into the surrounding environment.  For example, a lamppost in a park could project a pattern of light and shadows, giving a feeling of sunlight through trees.

  With the evolution of LED technology, things have become more interesting than ever. Designer Dennis Parren has given a glimpse of what is possible with his CMYK lamp, which casts multi-color shadows onto walls and ceilings from a white light source.

There is now greater design freedom because shadows are not simply treated as an absence of light, but instead as decorative, playful elements that significantly enhance the overall effect.  Ultimately, modern lighting is changing shadows into an actual material in itself for creating art and design.

  What’s your take on shadows? Do you see them as a valuable addition to the designer’s toolbox, helping bring depth, texture, contrast and form? Have you already seen examples of how the interaction of light and shadow creates a richer experience? 

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Repainting the world’s buildings with light

Playing light like music - by Laura Taylor

Julien Bayle, sound and visual artist, talks to Future of Light (Part 1)

Check out more Future of Light articles about Design

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Have you played the world's biggest video game?

Anybody up for a game of Tetris?

Dr. Frank Lee, a professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, decided he didn’t want to host just any game of Tetris. He wanted to host the world’s biggest.

As you can see, Dr. Lee succeeded - the results (and images) speak for themselves.

What game would you want to play a giant game of using lights and buildings?

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Click here for more Future of Light articles on Sports and Leisure

[futureoflight]

‘Monday morning blues’ and how to recover

By Luc Schlangen, Senior Scientist at Philips Research

It’s Monday morning and your alarm goes off. If you’ve been out partying late over the weekend you’ll likely stumble out of bed tired and with a vague headache, feeling somewhat dizzy and definitely not your best.

It’s not only the lack of sleep, although that is certainly a factor. What you’re feeling is a sort of jet lag: you were awake when you’d normally have been asleep and now you feel sleepy when you should be awake. It’s often called ‘social jet lag’ and has a similar cause: you’ve messed around with your circadian (daily) rhythm so that your body’s internal clock is out of sync with your normal schedule.

Left alone, our natural sleep cycle is actually around 24 ½ hours (although it differs from person to person) rather than the 24 hours determined by the sun. Without light to adjust our daily rhythm, we’d get up and go to bed half an hour later every day. Instead of this constant shift, daylight resets our cycles to the same time each day.

The time at which we are exposed to light is critical to how our internal clock works. It’s linked to our periods of deepest sleep: when our core body temperature is at a minimum. This time during our sleep cycle differs from person to person, but on average it’s an hour or two before our normal waking time.

Being exposed to light in the evening – before the point of deepest sleep – tends to make us go to bed later and get up later.

When we are exposed to light in the morning – after the point of deepest sleep –the body clock is reset so we go to bed earlier and get up earlier.

Therefore, light is critical to the Monday morning blues, which is why Philips Lighting became interested.

Monday morning blues and your sleep/wake cycle

Say that during the week you get to bed at around 12 midnight and wake with the ring of an alarm at 6.30 to get ready for the daily commute. Then, on Friday and Saturday night, you go out – perhaps getting to bed at 2 or 3 o’clock and recovering somewhat by sleeping in on Saturday and Sunday morning.

This would delay your sleep cycle by about an hour so that on Sunday night, you’d naturally go to bed an hour later than your routine – at 1 o’clock – and get up an hour later at 7.30. On its own, that would not be enough to give you Monday morning blues since we’ve evolved to adjust our sleep cycle slightly without ill effects.

However, exposing yourself to bright lights on Friday and Saturday nights can delay your sleep/wake cycle by an hour a day. So, on Sunday night your cycle is already delayed by two hours which makes you want to go to bed at 2 am and get up at 8.30 am.

On Monday morning, though, the alarm wakes you as usual at 6.30 am and that’s when the problems start. During the week your time of deepest sleep is around 4.30 am but over the weekend it’s been delayed to 6.30 am or later. So, you’ve woken before your time of deepest sleep.

  Morning or evening light?

The consequences of rising before the time of deepest sleep is, that our body thinks we are still receiving ambient evening light. If we work indoors, there is often not enough light to push our sleep period back. We become tired and irritable: hence the ‘Monday morning blues’.

You may find it even harder to get to sleep on Monday evening, so the blues can continue into Tuesday as well. Because you’ve thrown off your body clock, you actually need quite a bit of time to recover from the weekend.

Suggestions for recovering from social jet lag can include wearing sunglasses, sitting in a darkened room and telling people to go away and leave you alone. But at work that won’t do your career prospects much good, so here are some alternative strategies.

  Avoiding the Monday morning feeling

Here are some tips for avoiding that Monday morning feeling:

After an active Friday and Saturday night, take Sunday to relax.  

Wake yourself up properly on Sunday morning. It’s best to use sunlight or bright blue-rich artificial light. Sit by a window since that gives you a lot of light while enjoying your Sunday morning breakfast. Getting out and exercising will also help wake you up for the day. Take your child outside or your dog for a walk, even if it’s just for half an hour.

Use Sunday to top up your sleep. If you can, take naps during the day. Try to resynchronize your body clock as well. Sitting quietly in a darkened room during the day can help. In the evening, don’t drink alcohol and caffeinated drinks like coffee, tea or cola.

Get to bed nearer to your normal routine on Sunday night. During the last one or two hours before bedtime on Sunday evening avoid bright blue-rich lights since these also delay your sleep cycle. Use warm (red or yellow) lights instead.

Make sure your bedroom is dark and use eyeshades and /or earplugs if they help you to sleep. If you need a night light, use one that emits predominantly yellow or red light. It should be dim, but you should be able to see safely without stumbling.

  Want to learn more?

If you are interested in how lighting affects the human body, join one of the Philips webinars and go to www.philips.com/lightingwebinars

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Can you defeat jet lag with light?

Can we control light? - a guest post by Laura Taylor

Check out more Future of Light articles about Health and Wellbeing

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Can we control light?

A guest post by Laura Taylor, Philips Lighting

It’s safe to say that the extraordinary advances made in lighting technology offer virtually limitless possibilities for being creative with light. This, however, raises another issue: what’s the best way of interacting with, and controlling, light?

It all started with the douter, an instrument used to extinguish burning candles. Gas and oil lamps could be turned off, but also adjusted to give more or less light. Electric light went hand-in-hand with a switch.

  Then came dimmers. With LivingColors came an intuitive remote control, allowing you to specify millions of different colors and alter the intensity. With Hue you can do all that and more, using your phone (with, for example, the Goldee app). So what’s next?

  A lot depends on context of course. If you’ve just arrived home from work, low on energy and in need of relaxation, you probably just want to push a button, flick a switch or choose a pre-defined setting.

  If, on the other hand, you’re feeling more creative and fancy composing a light symphony for your living room, then you’ll almost certainly need a PC, tablet or smartphone. If you want, you can program every single pixel.

  And that’s the thing; people with no technical design knowledge can create fascinating lighting effects. It’s even become easier than ever before to design your own apps - so there’s nothing stopping you from developing a unique way of controlling the lighting in your home!

  Of course, it’s not always a linear process. Hue recently introduced a wall switch, known as the Tap, because people don’t always want to get their smartphone out to control the light, or because someone else wants to change the settings.

  Nonetheless, it’s clear that the way we interact with light in order to unlock its potential is entering a new, fascinating phase. In a way it’s comparable with the rise of the personal computer.

  In the beginning you had to enter written, coded instructions via a keyboard. Not everyone wanted to, or could. Everything changed when the mouse was invented.

  Now, we have touchscreens and even voice control. Toddlers can work out how to use tablets in minutes.

  Do you see the same thing happening with light? Will we all be doing extraordinary things with lighting, through a few taps of the finger, in the foreseeable future? And what kind of new challenges will this bring?

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Customizing Light for the Modern World - a guest post by Susanne Seitinger

Can you defeat jet lag with light?

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