Lucept

At CES 2012, Samsung introduced an amazing 46″ LCD transparent television with touch controls.

My office of the future will definitely have one of these. 

Check out Core77′s post about it.

Math and I don’t get along all that well, even on simple formulas. So that is why I love this “rule of thumb” from Wikipedia:
“Doubling the distance reduces illumination to one quarter”

I had to go to Gap today to return some baby clothes, and what did I see????  Light Bulb Boxers!  So of course I had to pick a pair up!

Nice variety of lamps, too…you got the A, R, T, plus some CFL screw-ins and even a metal halide profile.  Buy one for your favorite lighting fanatic today!

I propose that successful Product Management/Marketing employs three key functions: listening, synthesis, and advocacy.

Listen.  Listen to your customers, your sales team, your management, popular culture, your heart.  Listen to industries outside your own; that is where the “cool stuff” usually appears from.  Organize.  Build an institutional memory system that everyone can openly access.

Synthesize the tremendous volume of inputs.  Recognize the “white space” opportunities outside of existing product categories. Blend innovation risks.  Determine priorities (“focus” is the ability to NOT do the other 101 good ideas on the list).  Be willing to pause and think, to recognize incomplete information.  Just do it: create design experiments, prototypes, demonstration projects.  Prove the strategy.

Advocate your reasoning, beliefs and intuition.  Co-develop product specifications with your engineering and supply chain groups to win “buy in”.  Support the fragile ideas along with the “obvious winners”.  Become a good teacher.  Help your sales team, customers and industry become savvy about the products.  Help your customers become better designers.

And while “Design Thinking” has received lots of attention over the past couple years, Design Thinking itself is not complete enough to make for a successful product design and development cycle.  But it certainly enhances each of these individual functions.  Establishing an exploratory, generative, abductive process at the front end of almost any project is a badly needed balance to the rigor of the more common analytic, deductive processes employed by engineers, managers, etc.

This is not lighting related, but this is a very interesting article from Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media, about how they are advancing the design of their commercial blogs.  It really provides insight into how these sites make money.

SEED Magazine has an interesting piece on bioluminescent organisms.

One paragraph in particular reads like Mother Nature’s version of interactive lighting control:

“Their lights have a variety of purposes: Camouflage, attracting mates, attracting (or distracting) prey have all been observed. In animals with nervous systems, in most cases, neural activity initiates the bioluminescence. But in the velvet belly lantern shark, Lynn says, researchers found that the glowing was not caused by nerve cells. Instead, it seemed, certain hormones controlled the glow: Melatonin and prolactin turned it on, and a hormone called Alpha-MSH turned it off. This makes some sense, as melatonin is activated by darkness (it helps control sleeping behavior in humans). This species of shark uses glowing as a form of camouflage.”

WET Design, the designers and fabricators of the most bad-ass fountains ever, have a snazzy new full-screen Flash website that includes a new video of the Dubai Fountain.

6,600 submerged lights, 25 color projectors, hundreds of submerged robotically-controlled nozzles and enough compressed air to at once blow 22,000 gallons of water as high as 500 feet sure do make for an impressive video.

Check out the gorgeous pieces on Lisa Foo & Su Sim’s blog page.  Lisa Foo is an architect and Su Sim is a landscape architect, both from Malaysia.

Continue reading ‘LFSS: Light fixtures from recycled water bottles’